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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25829722">other things i'll never be</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/limerental/pseuds/limerental'>limerental</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Other Things I'll Never Be verse [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>A Trans love story in triplicate, Ableism, Additional Warnings by Chapter, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Character Study, Everyone is Trans, F/F, F/M, Gender Dysphoria, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Trans Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Trans Jaskier | Dandelion, Trans Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Transphobia</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 03:02:54</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>23,932</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25829722</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/limerental/pseuds/limerental</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Yennefer renamed herself when she was fourteen.</p><p>Jaskier re-learned his own name and built himself from the ground up and then again and all over again.</p><p>Geralt denies and denies and denies.</p><p>aka everyone is trans and most things hurt but maybe it can hurt a little bit less together</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Other Things I'll Never Be verse [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1954672</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>210</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>356</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Trans Characters in The Witcher Universe</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. realization</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>please take care of yourself friends. I will try to warn for what I can with this fic but because of the subject matter and the fact that it's these three, there will be messy, internalized (and probably externalized) transphobia and homophobia, possible ableism, possible suicidal ideation, unkind thoughts and shitty mental states, drinking, denial, descriptions verging on body horror and general depictions of being trans and dysphoric and having a body and falling in love very very messily that may not be comfortable for every reader</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCoqjFbjxns">
    <em>I am still waiting for the visions</em>
  </a>
  <br/>
  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCoqjFbjxns">
    <em>possession has yet to take hold of me</em>
  </a>
  <br/>
  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCoqjFbjxns">
    <em>we all want to burn on a pyre</em>
  </a>
  <br/>
  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCoqjFbjxns">
    <em>so tell me what kind of witch are you</em>
  </a>
</p><p> </p><p>I.</p><p> </p><p>Yennefer was fourteen when she first looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, flecks of toothpaste grimed around the beveled edge, and thought <em>what would I look like with breasts</em>. She blinked and she sucked her lips back against her teeth and she looked some more, looked at the puckered surgery scars, mauve pinpricks from scopes and fidgety, jagged edges torn where the surgeon rearranged her vertebrae one by one.</p><p>Or at least it had felt like that for a long while afterward, half of junior high spent wearing a hard-shell brace so her shoulder didn’t slip back to her left ear or her spinal cord slither out of its protection like toothpaste from a tube. Or something.</p><p>When she was born, she was not named Yennefer and almost wasn't named at all on account of the doctors not knowing if she’d live. Born crooked and blue and immediately cocooned in a NICU oxygen hutch where she twitched into pink life and then went yellow like newspaper print before she finally, finally went pink again many months of tears and prayer chains later. Her mother recalled all of this to anyone who would listen as often as she could, crooning to total strangers in the grocery store checkout line <em>”oh you should have seen how small my little broken baby was”</em>.</p><p>Part of her wished that her mother could have waited another fourteen years to name her, just hang on another decade and a half waiting to see if she’d make it. Because when the cold realization that she’d been named all wrong hit her while she looked long and hard at her pudgy adolescent body in the mirror, she considered that maybe she wouldn’t. Make it.</p><p>Because she looked at herself and saw someone just starting to bulk up around the shoulders, just starting to lean around the middle, just starting to get little tufts of a moustache, and she didn’t know that someone, didn’t want to be that someone bubbling up against the first harrowing landmarks of manhood, hated the way his name rolled on her tongue.</p><p>So, she renamed herself, testing the name first without saying it out loud, just mouthing the shape of it, watching her lips shaped around the dip of her front teeth.</p><p><em>Yennefer</em>.</p><p>She had already, accidentally, gone by it for years.</p><p>It was a name adapted from a fantasy baby name Geocities webpage that she pulled up on the boxy desktop under her loft bed. <em>Yennefer</em> hovered next to Guinivere and Eowyn and Artemis and other more silly nonsense names in pastel courier new.</p><p><em>Yennefer</em> - fair one</p><p>She was twelve at the time and had not at all peered through the list hoping to rename and regender herself, only hunting for something to call her new RPG character (the character was all self-insert wish fulfillment, a violet-eyed mage of ill repute, a woman of sultry looks and smoky voice and ambiguous moral standing) and then of course, she called herself yen_69 on every forum and chatroom and gaming platform for the rest of her miserable teenagerhood.</p><p>Well.</p><p>She couldn’t pretend that she’d outgrown the childish moniker (she was still yen_69 on Snapchat and Youtube and Pinterest but had changed it to a more sensible and reasonable yoloberg on her public Twitter… her not safe for work private twitter was same old, same old of course) but it didn’t carry the same weight that it had as a youngster who had no frame of reference to grapple with the itchy, friction-heavy stretch of trying to fit into a body that did not go through the world like something that was hers.</p><p>She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror and leaned the meat of her hands against the counter, leaned close until she looked at each side of her reflection separately past the bridge of her nose, a different, mostly blurred part of herself for each eye. One side of her was still a little off-kilter if you looked closely enough. One shoulder inched toward her left ear.</p><p>And she said, “I’m called Yennefer” like she was finally breathing air.</p><p> </p><p>II.</p><p> </p><p>Jaskier named himself one saccharine, lilting, cliche line of poetry at a time.</p><p>He signed his pen name in looping cursive over and over in his lambskin notebooks. He liked to craft the spin of the ‘J’ and curly-cue of the ‘k’ and to end the whole thing on an ‘r’ that swirled back on itself and under, resting as a snug and squiggly tail underlining the whole thing.</p><p>He wrote a lot of haikus in the white margins of school assignments and scribbled wide, sparkling anime eyes beside them instead of taking notes. He drew little bunched tufts of dandelions and weeping eyelashes and poignant scrawls of imagery.</p><p> </p><p></p><blockquote>
  <p>
    <em>quaint, yellow flower<br/>curled petal under your chin<br/>what’s love anyway?</em>
  </p>
</blockquote><p>He learned when shipped off to prep school that the art of haiku was more expansive than syllable count, but he liked the rhythm of ordering the syllables and sounds, knocking them into line. He learned how to write a sonnet, patting out iambic pentameter against his bare arm, pat-<em>pat</em>-pat-<em>pat</em>-pat-<em>pat</em>-pat-<em>pat</em>-pat-<em>pat</em>. And he knew that a sonnet was more than fourteen lines and a rhyme scheme and a metric. Volta, turn, a hinge around a subject and about face. Turn it over in his palms like a Rubix cube rearranged into a different semblance of colors. The same object transfigured and back again.</p><p>He was like that, a metronome, ambiguous and gender-hungry. He was <em>Jaskier</em> on one face and <em>Juliana</em> on the other and some other person entirely every other day. He could not keep track of the thoughts inside of his own head, ricocheting from nebulous aspect of himself to hot, new nebulous aspect. He was a ping pong ball in a narrow room. He was that nostalgic bouncing, contorting Windows 98 screensaver, morphing from cube to sphere to sharp-edged mystery object as it rattled along a black expanse.</p><p>But when his troubles stuttered out of him one winter break at dinner, he didn’t have the vocabulary for any of that. He just cried a lot of messy tears and said <em>I’m not a girl, not really, not at all</em>, because he knew that much. He was bigger than that. He was grander than that.</p><p>His parents cooed and fussed. They were upper-crust liberals who knew all about transsexuals, yes, oh Jul-- Jask-- oh darling, your father’s work friend, Colette is a transsexual, you know, oh we can--</p><p>And they did.</p><p>He was seventeen when he underwent top surgery, voice cracking on the cusp of a second puberty. He couldn’t lift his arms over his head for half a year, elbows tucked and wrists flopping like a T-Rex. His right nipple stayed numb for almost two years, said they couldn’t promise full sensation (when will my nipple sensation return from the war), and then one day the nerves just flipped on like a lightswitch.</p><p>Welcome back, nipple. Good to feel you again.</p><p>Jaskier rubbed his knuckles over the scars across his chest and felt good about it. He looked good and felt good, digging into the scar tissue just deep enough to renew the ache that still hung on there. He’d been a late bloomer through his first puberty, his tits not even trying to fill until he was fourteen. It had taken his body three years to grow to a B cup and the surgeons one afternoon to carve them out. Nip and tuck.</p><p>He thought of the stitched edges of his bruised nipples hovering like a sad, disgusting slice of pepperoni on his flattened chest. One of them gone figuratively dark and without feeling like the surgeon had forgotten to screw it into the socket all the way. He was all tubes and pockets of swelling and red irritation and bruises and then he was all tender spots and lumps and then he was flat and remade and smooth.</p><p>He’d started to grow body hair two years on T, and it just didn’t seem to know how to stop.</p><p>Like his numbed nipple, his body skipped past the cue for that’s enough fur now, that’s quite enough, we will stay warm through the winter now we can wear that swooping neckline even in January but that’s enough now.</p><p>Jaskier thumbed at the hair on his chest, frowning long and hard and somehow discontent.</p><p>He had written this into life, these scars, this perception of himself. He had fought and bled for it. He had re-learned his own name, endured the humiliation of his parent’s tight smiles and too loud, too vocal corrections in the early days, been cheese-grated down to the vulnerable molten center of him and rebuilt it all in a swaddle of scaffolding and ended up with a reborn body that was meant to be his one, true final transformation into his higher form, his final Self, his truest hidden Nature coaxed up from the remolded clay. Genesis 2.0. Reboot.</p><p><em>Pros:</em> full body restart, better relationship with parents, voice deep like honey, a little guilty taste of male privilege<br/><em>Cons:</em> no sensation in right nipple, hair <em>inside</em> belly button, crippling sense of building dread that he would never ever feel at home in his body no matter how hard he tried no matter what forever and all time</p><p>Jaskier bounced about in his own head, ambiguous, androgynous, rattling like pocket change in a cupholder, and eventually, he did the only thing he could do.</p><p>Kicked out the walls and ping-ponged free and away.</p><p>Re-learned himself all over again.</p><p> </p><p>III.</p><p> </p><p>Geralt knew, knew for real, the first time he watched Jaskier put on lipstick.</p><p>It was in the shared dorm bathroom, Geralt barefoot after a shower walking with all the cocky bravery of a man who had grown up living in a man-only household and thus held no fear of foot fungus.</p><p>Some of the guys on the floor were weird about Jaskier for reasons that toed across the spectrum of bigoted phobias. He was wiggly and colorful and gay and both masculine and feminine in quickly swapping versions of himself. No one at their podunk liberal arts school in the middle of nowhere could really ever guess what he was trying to accomplish, especially somewhere like this, where two steps off campus saw you never a football field’s distance from a wildly-flapping Confederate flag and probably a few dozen loaded shotguns.</p><p>Their school had a decent Creative Writing program, Geralt knew. Or something. The STEM students didn’t really fuck about with the Humanities students, and Geralt didn’t really fuck about with anyone. He’d chosen to live in this freshman dorm for its reputed quiet and demure population and its location plopped right between the library and the dining hall.</p><p>The vivid lipstick that Jaskier smoothed along his lips was neither quiet nor demure.</p><p>It was pink. Maybe leaning orange. His round cheeks colored up with something that might have been blush or might have been a natural flush in catching Geralt watching in the mirror. His eyes twitched a little wider at the corners. There was a kohl freckle of mascara flicked onto the dip of his cheekbone.</p><p>Geralt had had his gay panic eons ago, growing up roughhousing with hired hands on his granddad Vesemir’s farm. He knew this wasn’t that.</p><p>He swallowed, staring too long at the color on Jaskier’s lips. Seeing the curls of body hair that tickled over the man’s collar, the parted swell of his full lips, the fluttering length of his eyelashes.</p><p>Then, he looked past Jaskier to his own hulking reflection in the mirror. Bare-chested, towel gripped at his waist, pink cuts of stretchmarks across biceps and hips that filled out with too much broad muscle too fast. The square, harsh cut of his jaw and dimpled chin and brutish twist of oft-broken nose. The flex of his pecs, his solid abdominals, the hard edges of manual labor blunting a little as he adapted to all-you-can-eat dining hall fare.</p><p>It all coalesced then, like something as vivid and peacock-sure as the vision of Jaskier himself.</p><p>Looking at Jaskier’s pink-orange lipstick and the beefy Frankenstein of shifting parts that was his own body. It didn’t even make sense, the half-formed thought, the impression that dug into his brain. He couldn’t even say why Jaskier’s lips and his bulk double-exposed onto one another inspired it.</p><p>Geralt knew, all at once (but knowing was a very different animal than accepting and accepting different than embodying and embodying different still than allowing) and what he knew was this:</p><p>
  <em>He was not a man. He didn’t want to be a man. He was not a man.</em>
</p><p>He looked at that thought, looked harder at it and looked again.</p><p>He dug a hole and buried it and tossed aside the shovel.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. foundation</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p>I.</p><p> </p><p>She was a witch one summer, whittling a blunt wand from a storm-felled limb, churning up potions in her Mama’s old pots, running barefoot chanting incantations most foul.</p><p>The new house stood above a swale of drainage land at the very corner of the freshly-dredged up neighborhood, and beyond that, a road that had been grit the year before and still woodland beyond, a mess of thorn bushes and gnarled apple trees and poison ivy. Her stepdad made her swear not ever to cross the road, and she looked right at the neat part of his gel-stiff hair and lied, plain and simple.</p><p>She had names for all the creeks that fissured across the land, some of them acid mine drainage orange, others snapping with crawfish and wriggling amphibians under overturned rocks. To pounce and snatch a frog mid-leap and feel its throat flutter against her crooked fingers, its wiry muscle pulse and clench all slippery and full of potential energy like a human tongue, that was power, that was magic.</p><p>Yennefer was alone in the woods the whole long, hazy summer that she was a witch, school not yet started. All her old friends would have been left far behind when she and Mama moved if she’d ever had a friend before. She was hunched, she was quiet, she grew up on one of those Appalachian family farms that was on its last gasps of air, barn roof caving in, pastures all ravine and muck, half sold off and weedy and dying, and she always went off to school with her Good Will clothes smelling a little like pig shit from her morning chores.</p><p>Yennefer was alone.</p><p>She named the creeks things like Devil’s Creek and Shit River and Piss Pond, and that was a sort of magic too, standing out there with the chilled water burning her knobby ankles and cursing out loud. Not cursing at anybody or cursing any one thing, just feeling the sting of the forbidden words lash the muggy air.</p><p>When the air went crisp and she dressed in new, pressed clothes Mama bought with her stepdad’s credit card at the mall, her hair parted down the middle and cowlick slicked down with gel, somebody on the playground told her that only <em>girls</em> could be witches. Somebody else said that Yennefer was weird-looking enough that maybe she’d been cursed by one.</p><p>That was the memory she returned to the first time she smoothed a black, crushed velvet dress down her bony hips and watched in the mirror as she bent to tug sheer tights up her pointed legs to the swell of her thighs. She fumbled the garter clip at first and then caught the fabric snug, turning to watch the meat of her leg wobble, washed paler than she truly was by all the black.</p><p>The crushed velvet dress fell just below the swell of her nothing of an ass, barely hiding the garters, and a pentacle dangled from the thick, black choker around her throat. All tipsily impulse-ordered online and of dubious fabrication, sweatshop-fimsy and shedding loose threads.</p><p>In the mirror, she looked evil, she looked poised, she looked capable of calling down the wrath of the heavens to char her enemies to black rubble.</p><p>She parted her mouth to feel the sticky pull of her black lipstick. She rubbed at the smooth glide of crushed velvet over nylon over her shaven legs.</p><p>There was a new kind of magic in the sensation, cursed and holy.</p><p> </p><p>II.</p><p> </p><p>Nobody ever believed him when he said he was a wallflower all the many long years of his youth. Gifted kid, meek and anxious and haunted, orbiting his brain-dead peers like a forgotten comet that sometimes dipped in close enough to be glimpsed for a moment. But only the tail of ice and grit, only the streak left in the sky.</p><p>Flirting off to undergrad, he struck, erupted, and here he was transfigured. He was queer. Loudly, viscerally, publicly. Here were his scars, would you like to touch them? Would you like to know how many dicks he'd sucked? (<em>back then it </em><em>wasn’t many, first kiss at eighteen in his long distance girlfriend’s powder-soft bedroom, finally, finally, her lips chapstick warm and sweet, how he breathed against her belly in her moldy basement shower, her cock flush in the pocket of his cheek</em>) He flaunted his sexuality, he brandished it, he yodeled out a blatant flirtation and leapt onto a friend’s back and filled the whole dorm with his presence for better or worse, sang in the stairwells for the thrill of acoustics, refusing to vacuum seal away his volume or die back to a neat, tidy fire.</p><p>No one believed he’d been quiet once, some prep school days barely speaking a whole sentence.</p><p>Not his first college friends, not his lovers, not his friends who were lovers, not a single one of his professors who delighted in his constant class contributions, not his upperclassmen who sighed in disdain over them, and especially not Geralt, who was one of his rare first friendships that out-lasted undergrad, his only rare friend who was a lover who didn’t build up and explode within the first week and then peter out but kept on smoldering, re-kindled and tended.</p><p>Looking back to his early college days, Jaskier flushed with embarrassment over the hellish, juvenile character he’d been, choking out coughs over artistic brands of cigarettes and crooning loudly about sexual exploits and beating his chest to recite poetry to the stars over the quad. No one had ever been more drunk than he was then, more in love with the whole world, more enamored with the skein of dew on spiderwebs caught glowing in an orange streetlight, more loud and proud and out than him. He kissed every single person in the campus GSA, collecting the letters of the acronym like the rattling assortment of buttons on his mustard yellow backpack.</p><p>Nobody believed him either when he said his parents weren’t stodgy, stuffy conservatives who his rebellion was dedicated to but old hippie intellectuals, Vietnam-era artists who loved their late in life only child with a calm and careful kind of all-consuming love that was suffocating all the same.</p><p>His childhood home was all dog-eared bookshelves and florid twists of impromptu murals his mother painted on the doors, ceilings, windowsills, acrylic paint on the frames of her moon-round glasses, his father’s gorilla hands fitting easy into the back pockets of her jeans. A nude painting hung on the flat expanse of wall above the dining room table, the woman’s neck tipped back in ecstasy, the man’s kiss against the foggy brushstrokes of her breasts.</p><p>Nobody believed him except the ones who read and really digested his poetry. Not the undergrad drivel that got shredded in heated workshops, not his first and very erotic chapbook, but the meaty stuff later on.</p><p>The cold and clear picture of a bookish, quiet little girl balancing on the precipice of snuffing herself out of the world. The self-elegies his parents sobbed over when he was thirteen. The therapists and the rubber bands snapping against his wrist and then at last, the cleansing fire of his second puberty, tied neat with ribbon like a manifesto of everything that was wrong with him.</p><p>Just cut out the diseased flesh and walk free of it. Here is the flaw, the point where the filament snapped, here is the stitch that would knit his torn edges together.</p><p>Jaskier thumbed at the hair on his chest.</p><p>He still kept on looking at the fractures in new ways. It was exhausting. He was a tectonic rift that he’d never reach the inception of, bubbling up anew every time he had it all cartographed, burning his fingers on the boiling seam of the fissure.</p><p>No one who read those poems could deny who he’d been anymore, but most didn’t say anything.</p><p>Only pinned him with dewy, sad eyes and turned the page.</p><p> </p><p>III.</p><p> </p><p>The night Geralt dropped out of grad school, he drove ten hours out through bleak midwest highway to the farm and swung the headlights of his truck over Eskel’s trailer, didn’t dare drive up to the main farmhouse even though a light still glowed ochre in an upper window, just fell out into the drive and stumbled right into a bottle of Jim Beam passed back and forth on the screened in porch.</p><p>Geralt squinted up at the flip-flop string lights stapled to the plywood ceiling and tried not to look too morose while Eskel turned the vocab of his newly-abandoned master’s in botany into curse words.</p><p>“Phytogenetics”, cussed Eskel, clenching his fist. “Chloroplast! Fuckin’ monocots, is what they are, kicking you out.”</p><p>He didn’t correct him, didn’t say <em>I quit, man, didn’t get booted</em>, didn’t say he was pleased that his brother had managed to read at least the abstracts of some of his papers, though Eskel was smart as shit and kept up with crop science and probably knew all those words anyway.</p><p>Of the twins, he was the one everyone thought would break out of the family business and go on into the world, but Geralt had gone and surprised them all (not that he didn’t have a mind that hoarded info fed to it like a goddamn encyclopedia but that he’d always been more practical than his twin brother, always fraternal even before his roots went grey at sixteen, before Eskel’s face split against a windshield).</p><p>So much for all of that. He’d left his adviser’s office this morning and emailed the registrar and booked it and drove through the strip out of town and kept going until he crashed on his brother’s couch, the past twelve hours unfurling behind him like the flapping ribbon of a projector that had reached the end of the reel.</p><p>“Don’t be rude to monocots,” slurred Geralt. “You owe your backside to monocots.”</p><p>Eskel tipped the bottle of bourbon in the direction of the cornfield shadow that hugged the drive and took a long swig each for the corn and the alfalfa and the sorghum.</p><p>“You know what you need?” he said when he’d finished drinking. “A fuckin’ dog.”</p><p>And that was how it happened, the two of them out in the pitch-black bay of the garage with wiggling dogs leaping at their feet, two potato-sized litters of pups and their rowdy mothers. Eskel thought all life’s problems could be solved with a good fuckin’ dog, and mostly, he was right.</p><p>Geralt brought one home, a round pudge of a thing wedged napping between his thighs as he drove, wriggling her little nose, sighing short puffs of whiny breath. He loved her, whole-hearted, within an hour on the road and tripped right into willingness to lay down his life for her in the next. (He almost did, a few times, dipping over the yellow line in his distraction over her pink yawn and needle-white teeth, the speckled paunch of her wrinkled puppy belly)</p><p>He made it alive and intact to his apartment complex and brought her out cupped in both hands to be cooed over by his little old lady neighbors reclining in their Adirondack chairs on their flamingo and garden gnome cluttered front patio.</p><p>Like she rolled in a vat of sugar is what they said, lifting her up to inspect and pinch at her dangling legs. Geralt almost called her that, Sugar, because, yeah, like all of Eskel’s farm dog Heeler pups at that age, she was more white than anything, flecked through with encroaching brown. In a month or two she’d be more brown than white and explode into a ceaseless terror, gnawing teeth and whirling dervish of a young dog.</p><p>The first night, she pounced on and ate a cockroach, then puked it still alive and writhing on its back onto the kitchen tiles. It clacked and rolled until Geralt had mercy and squashed it but was not quick enough to stop the rolly polly thing who now occupied his space and probably his whole damn shockingly gooey-soft heart from snapping up the corpse.</p><p>He called her Roach.</p><p>Back then, he had felt a thump of guilt for cooping a too-loud, too-much dog in his tiny apartment with just him for company. He wasn’t much company at all, and the apartment was stark and stale. The fluorescent lights zipped and sputtered and the drop ceiling sagged and yeah, there were roaches and yeah, the plumbing was iffy and wi-fi wasn’t even something he had the wherewithal or tech to know was spotty but it probably was.</p><p>And the pup didn’t mind any of that and didn’t mind that Geralt slumped on the couch most Friday nights and ignored calls from his brothers and ignored .edu emails and drank alone and drank a lot.</p><p>Roach didn’t mind, as long as he didn’t zone so far out he lost sight of her. She wriggled right into his lap and whined until he tossed something. Anything, she’d fetch remotes and slippers and washcloths and empty two liter bottles of Sprite. He didn’t have dog toys, not even a tennis ball. She didn’t have a dog bed or a kennel but that was just fine because he lasted one whole half a day thinking he’d be like his brother, no dogs on the furniture, making sure they knew their place in the food chain of the household. And then she whimpered on the threadbare carpet of the bedroom floor until he hoisted her up and let her wobble into the crook of his body, and Geralt swore he could feel her burrowing between his ribs and right into his chest.</p><p>Geralt didn’t get his deposit back on that apartment. He got a whiplash of a scolding when the landlord found out about the puppy and that was before he’d seen the bitemarks on the baseboards and the grey scuffs from her nails raking the front door.</p><p>And there were other apartments after that with new, more elaborate horrors, and there were ways that his life seemed to sour and curdle and go slippery every time he got both hands around it, but that was ok because there was always Roach.</p><p>The pitch of her whine was so shrill it made his teeth ache and her chilled nose tended to prod sharp in places he hadn’t even known could hurt like that when poked and she did not take no-I-am-too-hungover-to-play-fetch-with-last-night’s-beer-cans as an answer even once in her persistent, stubborn, pushy little life.</p><p>Geralt didn’t mind.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>oh you thought this was a fic? no, it's all messy character study with a heap of projection and too long paragraphs.</p><p>i promise some things might happen next chapter. maybe</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. collision - part 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p><b>content warning</b> - brief mentions of self-harm and description of self-harm scars</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>Now:</em>
</p><p> </p><p>Afterward, Yen stalked out through the swish of the sliding glass balcony door for a fucking smoke, not bothering to tie up her robe as she flopped into the sag of a folding chair and kicked her long legs up on the railing.</p><p>Yennefer wasn’t the sort of woman who did shit like this.</p><p>“Don’t tell Geralt,” said Jaskier, and she didn’t know if he meant what they’d just done on her hideous plaid couch or that he rummaged for his vape in the bag hastily discarded by the couch. (They’d quit together a few months back, but to his chagrin, Geralt did it cold turkey without a fuss. Meanwhile, the idiot had apparently never done anything ever in his brief life without at least an attempt at a fuss). He flopped beside her chair on the balcony, probably scuffing his knees on the Astroturf, shirtless and pink-cheeked, and took a long drag, letting out a billowing cloud of vapor that dispersed in the air between the buildings.</p><p>Her third floor balcony boasted a stunning view of a grey alley choked with Boston ivy and not much else, but it was private enough to lie out naked in the sun and get high and a nice breeze blew through sometimes, only mostly tainted by diesel exhaust.</p><p>Last night, Jaskier invited himself to pizza night with Geralt and left his phone charger behind and then showed up to reclaim it while she was fresh from the shower, answering the door in nothing but her fuzzy, purple bathrobe. Colliding into one another like some cliche amateur porno. It was no secret that Jaskier was a slut and fairly handsome and that Yennefer had negligent impulse control.</p><p>On the balcony, he looked at her naked body without intent to hide it, mouth pursed over the mouthpiece of his vape, eyes hooded, and Yennefer would have thought his look nothing but typical lecherous interest, blatant perving, if she had not so recently smoothed her thumbs along the faded scars on his chest, flattened her tongue against the heat of his cunt.</p><p>She’d guessed but hadn’t known. Jaskier wore that kind of queer androgyny that let him flit anywhere or nowhere, rough around the edges, slippery with sweetness.</p><p>He looked at her like somebody comparing battle scars. Most of Yennefer’s were cut before she knew who she was, hitching her out of her hunchback childhood, meant to hold her stiff and straight and proper like you could undo twelve or so years of being treated like she was half-animal, worth less than a butcher hog. Some of them she’d cut herself.</p><p>Years of hormones had softened out those neat, blunted edges. Estradiol, Spiro, the rattling cocktail of reclaiming herself.</p><p>She’d earned this body, carved and built up from nothing, and she knew he could understand that, felt the same. She saw in his face a mutual sort of recognition unique to people like them. She knew what he saw: the small peaks of tits with mauve nipples, the little paunch and treasure trail of her belly, the jut of her ribs, and the slivers of scarred skin on each wrist (deepest and freshest and meanest just below the seat of her palm and fainter all the way up to the elbow, repeated and practiced, a sustained habit she had replaced with Virginia Slims).</p><p>“You have the most beautiful breasts I’ve ever seen,” said Jaskier through a mouthful of vapor, promptly ruining her poignant musings.</p><p>“Grew them myself.”</p><p>“Is this--” He shot a quick look at her as though trying to gauge whether the question he was about to ask would be welcome. She gave him a quick look in return that she hoped he would read as absolutely not. Not even a little bit welcome. Little bastard did not get the memo. “Is this something we can do again? It was good, yeah?”</p><p>“Do you think Geralt would appreciate that?” asked Yennefer.</p><p>She and Geralt hadn’t yet put a name to the thing they had together, mostly because Yennefer wasn’t the sort of woman who put names to things, but it had been good in a way that wasn’t just about the sex. She didn’t usually fuck with cisgender guys or anybody at all, content with her life without the mess of fitting some stranger into it. But the man was thoughtful and not an ass and prone to ridiculous wise cracks and fits of chivalry and sent her pictures of thunderheads or scattered flowers with captions like <em>thinking of you</em> with little heart emojis attached. Nice and a little disconcerting.</p><p>Yennefer wasn’t the sort of woman who anyone sent heart emojis to.</p><p>“Oh fuck, oh God, Geralt,” gasped Jaskier. “Do you think he’ll be pissed? You guys are like… a thing, yeah? Oh god, I fucked his girlfriend. Again.”</p><p>“I don’t think he’ll be pissed,” said Yen, gracefully ignoring the <em>again</em>, “but I think he’ll be disappointed.”</p><p>“Oh fucking hell that’s <em>worse</em>. He’ll give me that look. He’ll say some shit like <em>it’s ok, Jaskier, I understand. I just wish you hadn’t done this.</em> Fucking hell. You know he will. And then I’ll feel guilty for the rest of my whole life, and I’ll die in shame.”</p><p>“I could help you fake your death,” said Yen. She dropped a hand to ruffle through his chestnut hair, long, black nails scratching his scalp. She liked him, somehow. “Better yet, I could kill you.”</p><p>“Then I would have to watch him mourn me. Oh Yennefer, he would be so upset. The grief of losing his very best friend in the whole wide world may just cripple his poor heart for good.”</p><p>“Then don’t watch him.”</p><p>“Preposterous. I couldn’t just fake my death and then not attend my own funeral. It better be an <em>event</em>. I’m holding you to this, Yennefer.”</p><p>“I said I’d kill you, not event coordinate some swanky funeral.”</p><p>“Aww, come on, Yennefer. No swanky funeral? Not even for your very most recentest casual couch hookup?”</p><p>“Casual couch mistake, more like,” said Yennefer.</p><p>His palm was warm as it pressed against her thigh, his face tipped up to look at her through long lashes, very blue eyes and pouting lips. She couldn’t believe she liked him. With a put upon sigh, Yennefer spread her legs on the balcony railing and let him scurry between them.</p><p>An hour later, sprawled on the cool concrete of the balcony, the sun having crossed over the building and left them in shadow, she looked at her phone to find a blinking message (❤︎ - geralt) and leaned over into Jaskier’s space.</p><p>Jaskier’s pink cheeks lingered. Sunburned.He lay starfished on his back, drowsy and slack-mouthed, a red smear of bite marks down his neck trailing down to the hollow of his throat and the first licks of his chest hair. Jesus, she’d never been a body hair person, but his went all the way down and then some and she couldn’t help but thumb it at the crux of his sternum, dead center between the pink scars under his pecs.</p><p>“Geralt says hi,” Yen said. His eyes sprang open.</p><p>“What-- you didn’t tell him I’m with you, did you?”</p><p>“I’m kidding, idiot,” said Yen. “He sent me a picture of a golden retriever.”</p><p>She showed him the picture of the golden retriever, taken on some street corner somewhere. Yennefer didn’t really like dogs all that much (Geralt’s own weirdly-shrewd herding dog was a nuisance and a handful), but she wasn’t usually the sort of woman who received random dog pictures so didn't really mind it.</p><p>“Aww and a teeny little heart,” said Jaskier. “Oh no, is he in love with you?”</p><p>He regretted the blurted question immediately.</p><p>“Maybe,” said Yennefer with a shrug. “I haven’t asked him.”</p><p>“That’s not really the sort of thing you just ask someone, Yen.”</p><p>“Eh, I wouldn’t know,” she said. “Never happened to me before.”</p><p>“What? Being in love, you mean? No one’s ever been in love with you?”</p><p>“Maybe someone has,” she said. “I just haven’t cared enough to stick around long enough to find out.”</p><p>“Oh Yennefer,” said Jaskier, and the little idiot sounded choked with tears of all things but probably it was just too much vapor in his lungs, “that’s the goddamn most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard anyone say.”</p><p>“Oh shut it,” she said and smacked his arm. “You’re best friends with Geralt. There’s no way that’s the most pathetic thing.”</p><p>“But why?” he asked. A little streak of an airplane’s trail chugged across the blue sky above the city. A warm breeze stirred stray hairs of her dark curls across her face. It was a perfectly ordinary Sunday afternoon. Jaskier seemed genuinely curious. Heartfelt.</p><p><em>I’m not the sort of woman who anyone falls in love with</em> she thought and didn’t say.</p><p>“Go make yourself useful and get me a beer,” she said instead. “<em>Not</em> the Bud Light. That’s Geralt’s and he is on thin fucking ice for bringing that to pizza night.”</p><p>Their fingers brushed when he returned, leaning down to pass her the bottle chilled with condensation, and before she knew it, he was in her lap, and she was kissing him again.</p><p>Her phone trilled.</p><p></p><blockquote>
  <p>
    <strong>Want 2 go custard? - geralt</strong>
  </p>
  <p>Sure. just us? - yen</p>
  <p>
    <strong>Going 2 ask J. Won’t answer phone - geralt</strong>
  </p>
</blockquote><p>“Hey dumbass, answer your text messages,” said Yennefer.</p><p>Jaskier scrambled up from the floor to check his phone on the charger.</p><p>“Whoops,” he said. “Guess Geralt wants to go get custard. With you. You and me. And Geralt. All of us.”</p><p>“Yeah,” said Yennefer.</p><p>“Are we doing that?”</p><p>“I want custard so yeah. We are.”</p><p>“Is it going to be awkward?”</p><p>“Are you going to make it awkward?”</p><p>“Are we telling him? Are we telling him that we… you know.”</p><p>“I don’t know. Are we five years old and can’t say the word fucked?”</p><p>“I’m being polite, Yennefer. This is me being polite.”</p><p>“If you were polite, you wouldn’t have fucked your best friend’s girlfriend.”</p><p>“Oooh so you’re his girlfriend now? Ooooh.”</p><p>“No, idiot, but you thought I was.”</p><p>“So we don’t tell him?”</p><p>“We go and eat custard. That’s what we do.”</p><p>Her phone buzzed in her hands.</p><p></p><blockquote>
  <p>
    <strong>See you soon. Been 2 long - geralt</strong>
  </p>
  <p>It’s been less than 24 hours - yen</p>
  <p>
    <strong>2 long - geralt</strong>
  </p>
</blockquote><p>She wasn’t the sort of woman who used to be flustered by cheesy, fuckboy flirting, but she knew by now that some parts of her would always be in flux in ways she'd never iron out. She blushed a little, hot, like she never used to before the hormones tipped her endocrine system inside out.</p><p>"Oooohh," Jaskier cooed from the other side of the room, twirling her car keys on a loose finger. "You love him back, you little trollop."</p><p>Yennefer got him in a headlock and sat on him until he whined and promised not to breathe a fucking word. She was the sort of the woman who did shit like that.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. collision - part 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p><b>content warning</b> for very brief fear of transmisogynistic violence</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>Two months earlier:</em>
</p><p>The dark-haired woman appeared in a halo of neon light against the clapboard veneer of the trendy bar. Black fingernails tapping a pint glass, bored expression, bare legs draped to the floor. How tall she was and strange and alluring, touched by the glow of the bar. Blue and red neon tipped in almost purple highlights onto her body, and she burned like an illusion, like a mirage.</p><p>Geralt watched her.</p><p>Yennefer watched back.</p><p>The stranger was rough-edged, dressed plainly, younger than the grey of his ponytail aged him. He cocked a flip phone in his big-knuckled hands. She was drunker than she’d wanted to be, burning with something inevitable and predatory.</p><p>When she touched his arm, he gave to her, breathing her in, like his body wanted to hollow into the depressions of hers.</p><p>Outside, the streets were slick and reflective, the air humming with rain, and he kissed her on the walk home, stumbling, the rough brick of the alley wall coming up to meet them and catching on her pantyhose.</p><p>“You ever been with a <em>real</em> woman?” she asked, voice husky, dropped a few octaves, drawing the stranger’s hand to grope between her legs. He felt her, the soft mound of her estrogen-limp cock cupped beneath his wide palm, and for a moment, he went still, long enough that she started to tense with the first waves of fear (<em>what a fucking fool what a fool to be the sort of woman that she was and fumble alone from a bar with a stranger necking like teens like he didn’t hold her whole life fragile like a bird’s egg, like he wouldn’t snap her, crush her, bury her</em>) but then he squeezed gently and rubbed against her and pressed his lips just under the edge of her smooth jaw.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>backwards before we go forward my friends!!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. collision - part 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>One year earlier:</em>
</p><p> </p><p>The moles, they said, after the years the prairies swarmed with fire, fled from the charred earth and did not spend the spring churning up roots and stalks. In summer, the bloom burst in more fullness than years without a fire.</p><p>Here, it had been a controlled burn, a pocket of remnant prairie maintained by the state. Resisting Roach tugging at the leash around his arm, Geralt stopped to catch a swaying blade of brown grass, tufted head just beginning to bead up. He would know her anywhere, <em>Andropogon gerardii</em>, great famed swell of the midwest prairie, huddled here with bunched, yellow <em>Solidago</em> and the first flecks of blue asters and with other, more demure grasses. He thought of Eskel last year at this time, flat slab of a trailer perched on a sea of field corn, calling his old academia fellows <em>fuckin’ monocots</em> with a growl of disparaging humor.</p><p>He knew <em>Andropogon gerardii</em> before he felt for the smooth track of her collar, dipping to sheath and unfurling blade. No teeth on her, no sharpness along the ridges of his finger, no blunt, rough edge for his nail to catch on. He smoothed the length of it between his pinched fingers, knowing the gentle glide he would feel before he did. He didn’t know what it was supposed to mean, not being any kind of poet, that he knew her better than most lovers.</p><p>“Do you two need some time alone?” asked some kind of poet, who had deigned to follow him to stand in a big field in the searing heat of late summer and watch him fondle grass. It seemed to be the way of poets, or maybe just of Jaskier, to latch onto his wavelength and dredge up whatever weird thoughts he was cranking out.</p><p>“Big blue stem,” said Geralt, tasting the common name on his tongue. Jaskier, in true poetic fashion, preferred common names but never remembered them.</p><p>“Ah,” said Jaskier. “It’s not blue but I’ll give you big stem.”</p><p>His eyes slid over the wide blur of grass with no recognition except for the odd spark of color and only then for the beauty it reflected, the poignance and sublimity of the blue sky and tumbled clouds above. And the beauty and poignance and sublimity only sustained his interest until he was properly sweaty and happy to tell anyone in earshot about it.</p><p>Geralt gave in to Roach halfway to tugging out his shoulder joint, allowing her to sniff and snort through the path of close-shorn grass that wound through the prairie toward the shaded treeline. Her black nose pushed up clods of dirt, and he thought again of the moles who had fled the fire, the burgeoning bloom of the meadow.</p><p>Pink spires of <em>Liatris spicata</em> swayed at the very end of their bloom time, most of the frilly stalks faded to brown. Were there more this year than last?</p><p>“Blazing Star,” said Geralt, touching a stiff bloom stalk with feathered leaves.</p><p>“Oh, I know that one. Gayfeather.”</p><p>The poet squinted at him, suddenly cheeky, his tongue pressed against his grinning teeth, and Geralt was struck by how bone-deep familiar that gesture was even though it had been two whole years since he’d last seen Jaskier in person, since they billowed in their emerald robes at their undergrad graduation.</p><p>The poet had been all fidgety with the blown-wide promises of the future and Geralt planned to go home to work a summer on the farm, long enough to finish cutting and baling the hayfields before he tripped off across the country to his graduate program and Jaskier had tugged at the front of his borrowed robes, stepped so close that Geralt could see the little, chalky creases in his mint-green eye makeup and whispered <em>take me with you</em>. And he’d said <em>fuck no</em> with an automatic finality that did not leave any wiggle room even for one as wiggly as Jaskier.</p><p>Something about the poet had always made him feel itchy and a little haunted, a hop-skip toward sensory overload every time he looked at him.</p><p>This reunion in a big, sweaty field hadn’t exactly been planned, spurred on by an accidental fumble into attempted social media literacy when Lambert had finally made him re-join Facebook a few months back. He’d almost gotten lost and discouraged in a swarm of <em>people you might know</em> “friend” suggestions, because a lot were people he had known once but only on the faintest, briefest level and most of them were successful now, most of them had careers and spouses and homes and smiled at him in the profuse, overflowing blossom of their happiness.</p><p>And then, there was Jaskier.</p><p>Too bright to look at, too much.</p><p>Geralt led them into the muggy shade of the forested trails that slipped away from the prairie. The heat cooled immediately, but the humidity kicked up to meet it.</p><p>Jaskier looked different than he had, smoothed out, almost like he’d aged backwards in the time they were apart. Splotches of exertion sat high in his cheeks, thumbs hooked in the straps of his backpack as he hunched under its weight, sweat slicking his chestnut fringe to his forehead, and he grinned like a moron while Geralt handed him a water bottle.</p><p>“What the fuck is in that pack if you didn’t bring water?” Geralt grunted.</p><p>“A picnic!” gasped Jaskier and behind him the prairie swayed in a swell of wind and the sky was the bluest it had been all summer.</p><p>It had been a year since his own controlled burn, lighting the fires of his career and stomping on the cinders until they crumbled to ashes. What had fled from those fires? He didn’t feel brimming with potential energy, ready to explode into a mass bloom, but then, he didn’t know fuck all about poetry.</p><p>Their picnic spread in a fern-laden grove was dive-bombed by insects and rumpled by Roach’s insistent full body begging. The poet laughed and licked jam from his fingers, and Geralt kissed the taste from his red mouth until the inside of his thoughts felt sticky with it.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>this whole thing is an experiment in what i can get away with and you will let me</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. integration</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The sunset dripped like yolk into the black ridge beyond the strip mall, the custard place a generic glass hollow in the dust-colored brick, wearing the veneer of whatever store used to occupy this space like a shell. The walls inside were cotton candy pink and blue and the AC cranked to glacial, so the three of them collected and paid for their custard and walked out into the empty expanse of parking lot, humid summer breeze touching their cheeks like a kiss.</p><p>Geralt let down the tailgate of his truck and freed a whining Roach from the cab. She perched between Jaskier and Yennefer on the tailgate, brown ears pricked in hopes of a taste of custard and tail sweeping the dust out of the bed. Geralt stood leaning against the tailgate, offering out every other spoonful to Roach’s searching tongue.</p><p>“Yuck,” said Jaskier. “He kisses you with that mouth, Yen.”</p><p>“You’re the one who lets the dog lick your face,” said Yennefer, and as if to prove her bizarre comprehension of human language, the dog whined and lapped the underside of Jaskier’s jaw with a cold nudge of her nose.</p><p>“Roach is a better kisser than Geralt, and we know it.”</p><p>“Sure, sure.”</p><p>Geralt shifted his body weight to lean and kiss her, stubble catching at the corner of Yen’s lip, and it was fascinating, the mellow kind of way he looked at her, the ease of it. Some stubborn part of her wanted to make it difficult, wanted to twist and prod and wound him, but at least in Jaskier’s company, she just let him draw away and keep on looking at her.</p><p>Yennefer wasn’t the sort of woman that men looked at like that. But Geralt wasn’t the sort of man she’d ever known before.</p><p>Custard bowls licked clean by the dog’s sweeping tongue and Geralt off to dispose of their trash, Jaskier leaned close to her, a fleck of cream stuck at the corner of his lips and whispered, “I’m going to tell him. When he comes back.”</p><p>He waggled his eyebrows, and she rolled her eyes.</p><p>“On your head be it.”</p><p>She could see him trudging back across the parking lot already, crossing through the circles of the streetlights, a rumpled, strange-looking figure in cargo pants and a too-big sweatshirt with chewed ties. He was tall and hunched in the same breath, awkward and shifty, never quite looking at most people when he talked. But he looked at Yen. He couldn’t seem to stop looking.</p><p>The corner of his lips ticked up when he caught her watching, his hands shoved in the pockets of his pants, the wind trying to free his grey hair from its haphazard tie.</p><p>“I had sex with Yennefer,” the little idiot blurted too loudly, leaning out of the truck bed toward Geralt, who stepped without thought between Jaskier’s dangling legs. They touched like that, easy, often. Yennefer groaned and resisted the urge to flick him in the ear.</p><p>“Thought you already had,” said Geralt, frown wrinkling his forehead. “You wink at her a lot.”</p><p>“Oh. Oh! I wink at most people. I wink freely and with very little discretion.” To demonstrate, he exaggerated a wink in Geralt’s direction, head tipped, tongue sticking out. “But we hadn’t. I mean, now we have. That is before today? We hadn’t before today. How long did you-- no, nevermind that’s not important. But we did. Sorry? Should we be sorry? Are you angry? Do you--”</p><p>“No,” Geralt grunted.</p><p>“Ok,” said Jaskier, and that was the end of the conversation.</p><p>Yen tripped and stumbled toward understanding it, their friendship, but always fell short. They kissed sometimes, slow and easy or Jaskier bit his lip and tugged on Geralt’s ponytail or Geralt snugged a hand around his waist and held on or Jaskier scrabbled his way up onto Geralt’s shoulders for a piggyback ride or Geralt, quiet and miserable and without preamble, reached out in public to hold Jaskier’s hand.</p><p>It went full dark with a haze of light pollution on the horizon, a halo of a glow from the highway and the city beyond touching the two men that bent together against the tailgate of the pickup. Roach whined at her elbow, and Yennefer felt a little like she was floating outside their orbit, observing something rare and strange from some drifting satellite.</p><p>But Geralt brushed the jut of her bare kneecap and held there, tickling up under her skirt, and Jaskier’s fingertips brushed hers where they splayed on the dusty truckbed and headlights smoothed over and past them and she saw they were both looking at her and she looked back. None of them spoke about it, not that night, but she could feel the tension in the same way she used to feel the hum and snap of high power lines, cutting along the swathe swept through heavy forest, looming and crackling. Some sameness drew the three of them noose-tight and bound. Some shared sort of destiny.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>one day i'll get back to the triplicate setup from the beginning or not because i'm inconsistent and do what i want</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. collaboration</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p>Yen answered her apartment door looking like some kind of very niche, very attractive pin-up model, and even as she made grabby hands for the greasy Taco Bell bag, Jaskier’s heart flip-flopped wildly in his chest. Oh fuck. He was ass over tits in love with her.</p><p>The perks of her remote job working for a moderately-sized tech company were a) Jaskier always knew just where to find her and b) more work days than not were thigh-high stockings, panties, and tits out kinda work days. He himself lived in a lonely apartment close to campus and usually was kept busy enough with teaching and studying, but there were times that he wasn’t kept busy or everything was too, too busy and he needed another reliable human being to ricochet off of and punch his heartbeat to life and remind him why he was doing all of this, why any of it was worth it.</p><p>Geralt was not reliable to locate, always off wandering to squint at leaves or getting lost in his own head, other times forgetting his phone even existed or seeming to forget that Jaskier even existed.</p><p>But Yennefer was easy.</p><p>No, no, correction, nothing about her was easy, but finding her and wiggling his way into her apartment was once he'd broke past the initial awkwardness of having sex with Geralt's girlfriend. She was responsive to his rattling messages, and her only demand when he texted COMING OVER at any and all hours was <em>five layer burrito and a large baja blast and a loaded potato griller or perish</em> and he’d swan over straight away to unload a straining bag of barely-food grade, greasy, tortilla-bound monstrosities into her waiting hands.</p><p>“Guess I’ll let you live for now,” said Yen, and Jaskier felt more than a little bit grimey and pervy ogling her slim legs, the slight bulge of her thighs over her stockings, the thick waistband of her black panties digging into her narrow hips, her bare upper body, the little peaks of her dark nipples. Yeah, he was a little in love with her. Yeah.</p><p>She retreated to her office which doubled as her bedroom, flopping back into her computer chair and slipping on her cat ear headset, food and drink kept well away from her very expensive, overpowered PC, the clear shell of which whirred and flashed with violet light. A lighter purple neon sign glowed over the gleaming display, proclaiming <em>i’m that bitch</em> in hostile cursive. He loved her. Fuck.</p><p>“I have a call in ten minutes. No funny business.”</p><p>“None? Not even a little bit? A smidgen? A teeny tiny--”</p><p>“Eat your fucking burrito. Do not get sour cream on my carpet again.”</p><p>“Can I just say-”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“--that you are looking extremely ravishing today, Miss Vengerberg.”</p><p>“Did I not just fucking say no funny business.”</p><p>“Sorry, sorry, but come on, Yen. It can’t be helped. Not when you look like that.”</p><p>“I’m putting a shirt on.”</p><p>“No! No, don’t, your tits pair so nicely with my five layer burrito.”</p><p>“You are the worst,” said Yennefer. “I hate you so much.”</p><p>“Don’t lie, Yen. I’m charming and lovely,” said Jaskier through a mouthful of burrito.</p><p>“Disgusting.”</p><p>“You like it.”</p><p>“I don’t. I tolerate it for the good head and Taco Bell.”</p><p>Jaskier let out an offended noise.</p><p>“Yennefer, I cannot <em>believe</em> you would--”</p><p>“Hold that thought, I’ve got work.”</p><p>He flipped her the bird, and she stuck out her tongue and tipped up the microphone on her headset to cheerily launch into work mode. Her customer voice dropped a view octaves from her usual drawl, sounding chipper tech guy smooth.</p><p>Jaskier always tried for a few moments to stay out of trouble while she worked, though he quickly finished his burrito and grew bored and began to wander. He fiddled about the bookshelves cluttered with outdated computer science textbooks and tabletop gaming manuals and an assortment of magical girl figurines, nearly fumbled a ceramic unicorn perched on the edge of the shelf (Yennefer cleared her throat loudly) and then grew bored of snooping and flopped back onto her bed. Her sheets were an uncomfortable shade of lilac and her black duvet the cheap, black sort fitted to college dorm beds. He burrowed into the scratchy fabric, filling his nose with the sweet and sickly scent of her.</p><p>His brain had been particularly fast and loud and irritating lately, catching on small details and frothing and multiplying those thoughts into dizzying, rambling, echoing sentiments and bothers and blunders. He couldn’t sleep, not really, but he tried to nap a while tangled up tight in Yennefer’s bed.</p><p>He listened to her speak low, friendly words to the customer on the line and already missed her real voice and waited for the call to end, waiting and waiting. He wanted her voice to tip back up into its feminine drawl and yell at him for drooling on her clean sheets, so he wriggled a bit further into the mattress and tried for some drooling and snuffling and snoring. Better than yelling, maybe she’d sit her ass on the lumpy shape of him under the duvet and pinch the back of his neck until he squeaked and then she’d kiss it better. Maybe.</p><p>But then, the call ended suddenly and he pounced up from the bed in a flurry of blankets and slung up to straddle her lap, the high-backed, lumbar support, black and white racing striped ugly nonsense of a computer chair groaning under their combined weight.</p><p>“Jaskier, you giant, awful moron, I have another call in ten minutes,” Yen drawled, her customer voice vanished, and Jaskier pressed his grin into her bare collar bone and licked the dark mole just under her jaw. She yelped in disgust, and he laughed and held on, wiggling his thighs a bit wider, feeling her ribcage swell under his palms, letting his fingers barely brush the little swell of her tits. “Jaskier, I fucking swear.”</p><p>“Oooh call me awful again, baby,” he mumbled against her throat, and she grabbed him by the back of his shirt and tipped him onto the floor. He flailed to avoid any bits being run over by her chair and loudly protested the treatment of his shirt (a pastel floral short-sleeve button down exploding with Bird of Paradise flowers and Monstera leaves -- Geralt hated it for the lack of proper venation on the Monstera leaves).</p><p>“Next call,” interrupted Yen, and Jaskier grunted and signaled zipping his lips and throwing away the key, lying there on her dusty hardwood floor in danger of being scooched over by the wheels of her chair if she so chose to scooch. She didn’t scooch, just cocked an eyebrow down at him lying there from time to time, then settled one of her stockinged feet against his belly and rubbed. He fondled her toes a little. She kicked him.</p><p>He lay there the rest of the call holding tight to her ankle to lessen her opportunity for further rib kicking and let his rampant, frazzled thoughts zip back toward the big and serious Problem that had been niggling at him lately.</p><p>That problem being Geralt. Or a problem that Geralt had. Was it a problem he had if he didn’t realize it was a problem? And was it really a problem in itself or simply the unrealization of the problem that was the problem? Anyway. Anyway. Jaskier had noticed it with more frequency ever since Yennefer sprawled into their lives. Alarm bells went off, red flashing lights, clear and present signals. He’d always guessed, but he couldn’t be sure.</p><p>Yen’s call ended, the last of the night. Jaskier pressed his cheek against her ankle, and her shaved legs scratched stubble-sharp against his face. She let him gnaw teasingly on her shin for a drooling moment before she promptly shoved herself out of her computer chair and sat firmly on him, ass planted in the center of his back.</p><p>“Oof,” he said, her foot twisted around to press his head down against the floorboards and then, “do you think Geralt might be trans?”</p><p>Yennefer blinked at him and stopped squishing his cheek with her toes. She blinked, and he could tell she was connecting the same dots and patterns he had, fitting it all together. Yen was smart. He loved her.</p><p>“Oh,” she said, blinking some more, and he made a <em>see, see what I mean?</em> noise low in his throat and she absently tapped her fingernails against his back, pinching a little. “Oh fuck, you could be right.”</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>i love them so much i love them so much i love them so</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. suffocation</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>kinda content warning for the vocab that geralt uses about about yen's trans genitals. I know that not all trans women are comfortable with having said anatomy called a cock/dick and would prefer other words but for the sake of this story, yen is and has told geralt so.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p>The old house looked like it had crawled up the side of the hill and perched barnacle-like there on the knife edge of tumbling down, foundation held fast mostly by the tangle of wild grape and poison ivy that tiptoed around the weathered border fence of the property and tickled their vines through tantalizing gaps.</p><p>Last fall when Geralt had moved in here, he spent every day chopping and slashing and beating back tangles, tugging and clawing out invasives (tangled jag of multiflora rose, bush honeysuckles exploding in sweet fragrance, reddish spikes of barberry) but he’d had to leave the stuff beyond the bowing fence for the sake of the structural integrity of the near cliff of a hillside. The backyard was small and pinched and steep but large enough for Roach to race after a ball and flat and sunny enough in one small spot for a raised bed garden next to the ramshackle deck. The poison ivy peeked its trembling leaves along the top of the fence and Geralt whacked it back.</p><p>Anyway, poison ivy, he told anyone who would listen, was a native plant. <em>Toxicodendron radicans</em>, the name simple and descriptive in the way of his favorite botanical names. You knew what you were dealing with when you read <em>Toxicodendron radicans</em>, even folks with minimal knowledge of botanical Latin. He liked things like that, plain and simple and obvious, and so he had no clue, no fucking clue how or why it was that he liked Yennefer so fucking much.</p><p>She looked out of place her first time in the rented house, swaying before the windows in the front sunroom, chunky heels held in hand. She was tall and lithe and her dark hair was loose across her browned shoulders, the ties of her black sundress tickling down the naked center of her back. They’d gone out to dinner at a place with a leather-bound menu whose wine list was a page longer than the entrees, and Yennefer was tipsy and fluid and Geralt was wholly gone for her.</p><p>“You… have a lot of plants,” she slurred which was an understatement. He had never had an apartment with light enough for more than a few, stretched, sad Pothos so finding this place last year with its old, tall windows and its bright front sunroom meant he lurched into a bit of an obsession. She bent to touch the leaf of a willowy ficus that occupied a whole corner. “How many?”</p><p>“Hundred or so,” said Geralt, knowing it was more like 300.</p><p>“Tell me about them,” she said. She tugged on the itching collar of his dress shirt until the back of her thighs met the couch and she stretched herself out for him. He could rattle off the name of every plant in his home if she wanted him to, could spread her out on the couch and walk his fingers up her bare legs while he whispered botanical Latin against her smooth calves, but he knew that wasn’t really what she wanted.</p><p>Geralt dropped to his knees, the carpet cushioning the creak of his joints. He could hear Roach whining closed up in the bedroom the next floor up and imagined he could hear the plants entangling their roots around the old house. The swaying, tamed houseplants cluttered in every window and the wild vines out beyond the yard.</p><p>He thought how a Pothos kept in a little terracotta pot on a windowsill would never outgrow its diminutive form, leaves no larger than his palm, but given support for its roots to dig into, given light to climb toward, tossed into a humid jungle somewhere, that same plant could grow leaves the size of his torso, could choke and spread with the best of them.</p><p>He thought how he wanted to climb Yen like a vine if she’d let him, if she’d allow it.</p><p>She allowed it, tugging his hair loose from its tie and guiding him forward to where she wanted him, shoved under the rucked up edge of her dress. She smelled musky and tinged with sweat and wore panties edged in lace. Sometimes, she tucked everything down there up tight, bound and hidden in ways he doubted was comfortable but not tonight. Tonight her dress was loose and ruffled and her lace panties stretched scratchy-soft over the bulge of her genitals, and Geralt buried his face there, humming low in his throat.</p><p>“You’re purring,” Yen said with a laugh and scratched her nails against his scalp. He pressed his hands up under her dress to thumb the waistband of her panties and his hands swallowed the little soft mound of her belly while he held his lips over the little soft mound of her cock.</p><p>She trembled under his hands and arched to meet him, and he dragged his fingers into the waistband and tugged until she was bare under his tongue. She kicked her panties free and caught him in the shoulder with her shin and laughed and tugged him closer, closer by the hair.</p><p>He’d sucked a dick once or twice before back in his experimental undergrad days, but this wasn’t anything like that. Yennefer stayed soft and pliable in his mouth, hot and heavy on his tongue, and she was hair-trigger sensitive, panting at the slightest pull of suction, the barest touch.</p><p>She tasted good. Different. Sweet and sharp, but he didn’t know if that was true of all women like her or just Yen, if his senses had all re-aligned toward her, tipping like the face of a leaf toward the sun.</p><p>He snuck around the edges of her body, fingers creeping up under her dress, aching, pleading to be let in. He pressed his nose against the waxed hairless crease of her thigh and breathed in. He begged wordlessly, head bowed on his knees before her, mouth full of her, head full of her.</p><p>She dropped her foot into his lap and pressed her heel against his erection, and he came just like that, punched and sudden. She dribbled on the flat of his tongue.</p><p>He knew when she wrenched herself free of him some vital part of himself would go with her, rootless, unbound, fatal.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. calculation</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The old house seemed barely structurally sound and groaned through the night like it might just slide down the hill after all, and Yennefer hardly slept, clinging to the mattress in a woozy spin of wine drunk nausea that had just started to settle when the dog nudged a cold nose at her ankle and awakened it again.</p><p>The bedroom had high ceilings and cracks fissured in the plaster. She had to look a long way up to the wobbling ceiling fan and had the grim thought that it would wobble right out of its socket in another rotation or so and take off like a whirling propellor blade. Unfamiliar rooms lodged something twitchy and paranoid inside her skull or maybe it was just the wine or maybe it was the memory of Geralt whispering <em>I love you</em> against her thigh as she settled from the almighty orgasm he had coaxed from her.</p><p>Maybe it was that.</p><p>And then at 5AM, the alarm at the bedside began to trill, and Geralt rolled and groaned and slapped it silent, accidentally tugging the plug from the wall in his enthusiasm. He grumbled an apology. Had forgotten to switch off the alarm, day off and all, sorry, sorry, and promptly began to rumble with snores again.</p><p>Yennefer had laughed when he told her what he did for a living that first night in the bar, and he had flushed pink to the tips of his ears and she had thought how nice it was to fluster someone so easily.</p><p>Through the muck of spring and blaze of summer, he worked as a landscape foreman but that job only took him through half the year, while the ground was still thawed enough to work a spade. He picked up early shifts as a garbageman or “waste disposal professional” as he was titled by the city, and to hear him tell it, it wasn’t bad work or bad money. But still, it made her laugh picturing this big, awkward, shockingly gentle, dizzyingly pathetic man hauling people’s garbage each morning. Also, it made her a little sad knowing he thought of himself about as highly as those sacks of trash.</p><p>She slipped onto her belly to watch his sleeping face, parted lips and creases from his pillow. He had wanted to be a conservationist, he had told her. Had dropped out of his botany grad program after two and a half semesters because his brain got weird and dark and it all felt futile and he couldn’t make connections with other professionals and it all went numb and empty.</p><p>She ached for him, this poor, sad lug of a man. She and Jaskier had spoken back and forth about him for a week or so now, solidifying their idea of what ticked inside his big, stupid head, what strange visions haunted him. Were they alike? She and Geralt? She settled next to him to look at his face, soft and unlined in sleep. Tried to look at him and see someone else, something else.</p><p>“Why do you think so?” Yennefer had asked with her chin on Jaskier’s propped knee, looking at him crooked sideways in her bed, leaning out the window to blow vapor out into the twilight. He’d already told her what he knew, already extrapolated about vibes and auras and whatever else. Jaskier was crammed full of a whoosh of words like a colorful wash cycle but he seemed sometimes to have trouble shaking them out in order. He slumped back inside the window, smiled at her.</p><p>“He outright told me once”, said Jaskier. “He was very drunk, and I was leading him home from the bar -- this was four years ago maybe. We didn’t live together that year in school. Lived with some buddies in an apartment over a Subway. Maybe. I can’t remember. This girl used to work there who had the nicest skin I swear she looked like she’d been molded in clay and her--”</p><p>“Get on with it.”</p><p>“Be nice to my junk, thank you, hands off, Yen, no pinchy, but anyway, I was helping Geralt up the stairs. He was fuckin’ gone-zo, he was plastered, he was completely sloshed, he was-- alright, okay! He leaned his whole weight on me on the stairs and I was trying not to topple us both down and just grip the railing real fucking tight and he leaned in and he said-- well, I don’t remember the exact words frankly I too was a little bit inebriated -- but he said ‘shoulda been born a woman, Jask, god if I could choose, if I could flip a switch’.”</p><p>And that’s what they had to go on. A drunken confession told secondhand from years ago and a vibe and a strange hitch of discomfort she noticed sometimes when she smoothed her hands down his body. Geralt had vanishingly little self-esteem but in the same breath seemed disconnected from his own nakedness, would walk around whole ass nude or blindingly shirtless without blinking.</p><p>But to be touched? When her hands swept across the broad width of his shoulders, trickled down his ribs, found the peach fuzz swell of his ass, held his balls in the gentle cradle of her palm. The prick of her fingernails was not enough to explain his flinch, his fleeting sour grimace, the tension in his body. Yen could drain it away quickly enough bringing him off, but she had learned to demand he touch her instead, fit himself against her rough edges, rub the wet of his cock against her thigh and kiss her open-mouthed.</p><p>Were they more alike than she had thought? Yennefer dared to smooth a fingertip along the wrinkle of his brow. Such a strange and awkward man, more sentiment and nostalgia than he let on, smarter than her and still dumb as a brick, vocal when coaxed into speaking and embarrassed about it, all wit and sharpness to disguise the suck of something vacuous and dark inside him.</p><p>She tried to imagine what sort of woman he would be and couldn’t. She could hardly paint the full picture of him as a man. Too many moving parts for such an outwardly simple creature. He looked like somebody who hauled garbage and mowed lawns for a living. He looked like somebody who’d driven a tractor all through high school and summers in college, all weather-beaten and burnt-necked, and he looked like his shit taste in beer and he looked like his jacked up rumbling truck and he looked like the sort of man you could iron out easy and clean and simple.</p><p>He wore crocs and socks sometimes. His diet seemed to be half beef jerky, half protein shake. His hair was full on grey and went greasy fast, poorly-conditioned and frizzed out and charming. He was ugly, in a way. He snored and belched and slept so soft next to her, face tucked close enough to gust air against her body.</p><p>It would be easy, Yennefer thought, to allow this man to be one note in her mind. To slip away from him and not look deeper. Let him go on pretending to be simple. Not press at his bruised, oozing places to figure out if maybe they ached the same way.</p><p>She rose in the lightening dawn and creaked through the falling down house to make coffee in his grey kitchen and brought a mug flickering with steam back up the groan of the stairs to rest at his bedside table.</p><p>She kissed him on the temple to wake him, great, mysterious, ugly mess of a stupidly good man, and the stretch of his closed-eyed smile made her chest thump all weird and she knew, she knew she’d be here to figure him out, she knew if it was true, if they were alike, she could not drop him to fumble through this shitty fucking bad hand all alone.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. ascension</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>this here's a flashback chapter so warnings for transphobia (blatant and internalized and poorly-navigated), homophobia (use of f slur), brief/referenced misogyny and discussions of dysphoria. also, geralt (and eskel's) mother is never explicitly said to be bipolar but that's what i'm going for, so expect descriptions of poor mental health, depression, mania, etc.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p>
<p>I.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>It went like this:</p>
<p>She wanted to be a surgeon, looking at the puckered slivers of torn skin stretched on her spine, her shoulders, and thinking how their knives and sutures and scopes sang with a sort of magic. The pus and film and grind of transformation, muscle and tendons molded in the sure hands of the doctors who reshaped her. She wanted to study medicine, all the pre-reqs lined up, all the AP classes, late night study, exhaustion, fits of regret and determined grit.</p>
<p>Just one small snag left, one stumbling block. She didn’t want to shrink off to school as a vanishing, mousy nerd of a boy, long-haired and gangly, knobby-wristed and still a little bit crooked. She wanted to saunter, to stride in with a cock of her hips, to introduce herself as <em>Yennefer, Yennefer, remember my name and call me woman, name me she, don’t you dare forget it, don’t see anything else.</em></p>
<p>So.</p>
<p>She told her mother first while traveling to look at schools, sitting in the cracked leather of a diner seat, sopping up egg yolk with toast dripping butter with her mother saying oh darling oh little one of course I still love you of course but you know that I have to tell your stepfather.</p>
<p>Don’t, said Yen. Please don’t.</p>
<p>
  <em>You will not wear a dress in this house. You will not go by that name. You will not be a fag on my dime. Won’t pay for that fancy school if you’re going to choose this. Who wants a freak as a doctor? Who would trust you with a knife? What kind of success would you ever have? No. No way. No son of mine.</em>
</p>
<p>But Yennefer’s father was dead, and she was no one’s son.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>II.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>It went like this:</p>
<p>Jaskier sucked on hard candy in the bougie country store while his mother shopped amid the rustic shelves and organic produce and she took him to the art classes she taught at the community center in a room that smelled like ammonia and wet paint, sat him up with his own easel and palette and chubby brush and she swaddled him in winter clothes, in scarves and hats and coats and mittens, devoured and unbalanced by her care for him, toddling, wobbling.</p>
<p>Much later, the night after he told them, she sat on the end of his bed and crooned out an impromptu elegy to the girl that he had been.</p>
<p>“A funeral,” she said, patting his floral comforter. “What we do is we have a funeral.”</p>
<p>And later, Jaskier learned that to transition and allow the world to know him was to have a series of funerals over and over and over.</p>
<p>His father mourned in quieter ways, the same way that he knew Jaskier in quieter ways.</p>
<p>Jaskier learned to read in the cocoon of his lap, his father’s rough, hairy fingers smoothing under the letters, his voice patient and slow and rumbling and he learned how to fish on the banks of the creek out behind the house, his big, awkward father stooping to slip the nightcrawlers onto the hook for him, helping him cast the line, watching the bobber ripple in the water and he followed his father’s hulking form up and up the gnarled root climb of a hiking trail, his mother puffing behind him and he sucked on fresh-picked blackberries selected from his father’s outstretched palm, leaving a smear of purple stains.</p>
<p>For years, Jaskier’s father stumbled over forgetting not to call him <em>baby girl</em>, tripped over the word <em>daughter</em>. He spoke with fondness of how small, how tiny his little gi-- his daugh-- how small Jaskier had been in his big hands.</p>
<p>His father mourned that little girl over and over, and Jaskier learned to mourn her too. The ways she fit neat into his parent’s life, snug between them.</p>
<p>Jaskier mourned her and mourned the sort of man that even the best medical advancements could not mold him into. The height he would never reach, top of his head always brushing below his father’s shoulders. The cock that would never hang between his legs, hot and thick and nerve-thrumming.</p>
<p>And he mourned the in-between, see-sawing parts of him that felt genderless and androgynous and fluid and impossible to put words to, even in his own head. His mother’s confused frown when he wore dresses, glittery cosmetics. His parent’s concern when he chose to end hormone therapy after undergrad, content with the ways his body had changed, content to bear what would come next.</p>
<p>He was man and woman and neither, blending, liquid, and he made people nervous and flighty and sometimes hostile. And he put a little wrinkle of disappointment and worry between his parent’s brows. And he slipped on his pale white stockings over the thick curl of his leg hair, and he tucked a lace bralet over the scar-smooth plane of his flat chest, and he painted his lips red under the stiff bristle of his moustache.</p>
<p>He sang himself an elegy to the little girl he’d been and to the broad, hulking man he'd never be.</p>
<p>He held funeral after funeral, a celebratory kind of grief that went on and on and on.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>III.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>It went like this:</p>
<p>Geralt careened through boyhood in loud, brash, typical country boy fashion. His twin brother, Eskel, roared on beside him, four-wheeling, hay-raking, manure-scraping, skeet-shooting, vodka-sneaking redneck loudmouth assholes, all scrawny, lean muscles and beet-red sunburns their whole adolescence.</p>
<p>Their home turf was Morhen Farms, in the family for a damn long time, hundreds of acres overseen by their grandad Vesemir and a rabble of rotating, seasonal farmhands.</p>
<p>Lambert was one of them, cocky shit and brother by everything but blood, and there was Coen, third or second cousin, pock-marked and ballsy and vulgar, and there were other, older men who played cards in the dining room and laughed loud and long all through the night smoking and grunting and stumbling out the outhouse to piss, carrying on while the twins snugged together sardine can close in their upstairs bedroom fighting off sleep to listen through the vents.</p>
<p>Geralt never doubted what it was to be a man, because his granddad was the picture-perfect example of the whole sum of masculinity. Tobacco-scented and weathered and squinting, just as quick to bail his boys out of trouble as to leave them to their well-deserved fate. Geralt remembered Vesemir standing in the drive cross-armed and unmoving while he and Eskel rocked the biggest tractor in a sinking rut, mud pluming from the stuck-fast tires.</p>
<p>And life was simple enough.</p>
<p>There was rolling out of bed in the pitch black frigid crack of dawn for morning chores and then catching the bus out at the end of the drive and snoring through class and more chores after that. There was work consistently and always, calving and planting and raking and baling and equipment maintenance and odd jobs like nailing down loose shingles on the farmhouse roof and chopping firewood and digging trenches.</p>
<p>He never doubted being a boy and floundered into being a man, Vesemir’s big hand clapping his shoulder saying <em>you could really go places, kiddo, you sure could.</em> And some older farmhand pointing at him on a muggy, fly-heavy day in the fields, red in the face and sweat-stained saying <em>you stay in fuckin’ school because you’re smarter’n all of us, you fuckhead, you’re too smart for your own fuckin’ good.</em></p>
<p>His only taste of womanhood was the feather-soft memory of his mother. Pin-straight red hair, the same as his had been before it started coming in silver, her red, red mouth rounding over the whisper of a lullaby. Him and Eskel propped on her bare knees, her thighs sticking together in the humid heat, her voice watermelon-sticky and sweet like honeysuckle. She was all wild child and reckless and danced barefoot with them in the kitchen to the crackling radio, bumping one on her hip and the other twirled into a floorboard-slapping spin at the end of her outstretched arm, laughing, cackling.</p>
<p>He only knew later how young she was, fifteen when she got pregnant with no clue about the father, barely through her twenties when the court said she wasn’t fit to be a mother, not with her mood swings and her rantings and her financial situation.</p>
<p>Vesemir accepted custody. </p>
<p>Couldn’t hold a job, overspent, sank herself in debt one flit of mania at a time and then dropped low and napped all through the day, Geralt tiptoeing into the curtain-drawn dark of her bedroom after school to curl up against her belly and breathe with her. She smelled sour with sleep and kissed him on the crown of his head when he asked why she’d been crying and she told him hush, hush, it’s ok, little bird.</p>
<p>He was thirteen and brimming right on the cusp of something like manhood when she blinked out of their life and elsewhere. Headed for the west coast to be an actress, maybe. Didn’t matter. Never saw her again.</p>
<p>Geralt learned to be a man through careful study and repetition. His granddad’s gruffness and his brother’s rowdy bluster and the farmhands’ grit and crass humor.</p>
<p>He felt as much surety in that as he figured anyone else did, navigating the bizarre nuances and limits and social niceties. The school guidance counselor figured he was high-functioning autistic and that explained well enough the weirdness, discomfort, and restless itch.</p>
<p>“Geralt, do you think you could be a woman?” Jaskier asked him, soft and pretty, in that direct and brave way of his, and Geralt couldn’t answer, just shrugged and grunted and shook his head.</p>
<p>How could he know? He didn’t know what it was to be a woman, not really. </p>
<p>He knew what it was to be a man but didn't know what the proper metric was, whether he managed it or fell just shy.</p>
<p>His mother was a study of interrupted girlhood.</p>
<p>The cuss-heavy, drawling vocab of his adolescence was half misogyny and half slur.</p>
<p>He didn’t care about soft things and pretty colors and didn’t think he’d look too good in a dress. He wasn’t like Jaskier, bold and colorful. He wasn’t like Yennefer, defiant and proud.</p>
<p>What did Geralt know about womanhood? What could anyone know?</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. fortification</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>sorry netflix only fans, we doing hansa shit. also i added zoltan to the hansa because he's like.... idk he's like the danny devito of the gang. i want him to wear a feather boa and dance on tables at the gay bar. i want geralt to have to fish him off a light pole that he drunkenly climbed because he wanted to be tall. idk man.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p>To look at the man from the outside, it became easy to assume that Geralt was friendless, isolated, and lived a joyless, monotonous life alone with a little brown dog in a rented house one bluster of wind from falling off a cliff.</p><p>That was the impression Geralt did little to dissuade anyone of at least.</p><p>At their first, chance but somehow wholly inevitable reconnection, two years estranged, Jaskier looked on with trepidation and curiosity, endlessly worried that his once dear friend had backslid into a pit of depression and an empty life. That without Jaskier’s loud and colorful and freely-offered friendship, he had had no one to nudge him into going out, participating in society, being present in the world.</p><p>Jaskier himself found his social life suffering horribly after graduation as he and his closest friends ricocheted across the world in every direction. He flew across the country for grad school and was suddenly alone and harried and set loose in a city full of strangers, swamped with classes and teaching and writing.</p><p>In the end, he lost touch with most everyone.</p><p>Crashing back into the city of his birth for his PhD program he found many of his oldest friends who had stuck around getting married or settled in stable jobs or having babies and all so young, so young! He was only twenty-five! How could he possibly settle into a dull, droll, rote life circling the freeways and interchanges in humdrum traffic? (For one, he couldn’t drive.)</p><p>He didn’t settle.</p><p>He rattled around the city like loose change, skipping like a flat stone across pond water, fast enough to zip through the whole vibrant, pulsing world but too slow, too slow. Jaskier, somehow, got left behind.</p><p>But then, there was Geralt, who as poorly adapted to city life as he was just so happened to live in his very same city. Good old familiar steady Geralt who seemed not to have changed a lick in years. Geralt who was stoic and shuffling and quiet until you knew him better, until he quirked a brow at you across the room and said something so scathing and dry your ribs almost cracked.</p><p>(“Watch this,” Jaskier had told Yennefer one night early on, tipsy and sprawled on her hideous couch, Geralt slumped in a folding chair, absorbed in the horror movie on Yen’s flatscreen. “Here’s how you get him to talk, just watch-- hey Geralt, how about those pear trees they put in down by the mall?”</p><p>“Fuck Bradford Pears,” growled Geralt, his fingers tightening on his beer bottle. “Stinking piss shit fucking trees.”</p><p>Jaskier prodded, wide-eyed, faux curious over something he already knew but only because he gave a shit about hearing what Geralt had to say. Not the content itself, by God landscaping was a boring conversation topic, but he gave a shit about the spark in his friend’s eyes, the passionate slur, the clench of his jaw. He could talk for hours, volume escalating, animated and chattering, about those few, narrow topics that interested him. Or, mostly, pissed him off.)</p><p>Geralt had always been like that. Awkward and almost shy except by accident, and Jaskier had expected him to be in the same boat friend-wise. That he’d sling himself back into Geralt’s life and be the thing to prod him out into the sun again, just the two of them against the world like the old days.</p><p>It was a romantic idea. He loved Geralt, deep and breathless, one and only, tried and true. Or something. As true as somebody like him could ever manage, as one and only as circumstance allowed. Either way, they didn’t put words to it. Easy, slippery, holding hands on the subway and leaning to kiss the corner of Geralt’s mouth on the escalator, dropping his cheek against the night chill of his leather jacket. Easy-peasy and unexamined, just the two of them.</p><p>But.</p><p>Jaskier hadn’t expected to find Geralt surrounded and adopted by a whole gaggle of loudmouth weirdos who engaged in frequent social outings and dinners and game nights. He hadn’t expected that in the least.</p><p>They weren’t friends so much as cohorts. Geralt’s job as a landscape foreman through the summer meant he operated as the leader of a bizarre crew of mismatched landscapers, the long days spent on the job site lending themselves to a strangely intimate knowledge of one another.</p><p>Jaskier was fascinated and catalogued the lot of them like he was lining up the characters for a play (which he may or may not have plunged deep into writing -- unfortunately unlikely to ever see a stage given the sheer amount of profanity its dialogue contained).</p><p>Regis, middle-aged and wiry and full of sage, unprompted wisdom, who neither smoked nor drank but always came bearing a jug or two of home-brewed mead from his backyard beehives and teeming herb garden.</p><p>Milva, a scrappy, hot-headed woman with opinions in spades, mainly environmental and political in nature, debating with Geralt even though they agreed on most everything. She dyed her bluntly-shaved undercut a new color each week.</p><p>Cahir, plain-looking and shaggy-haired, who looked very much like a man who could dig big holes and hoist saplings about and did so with diligence and care. He was a relentless craft beer snob, whimpering each time Geralt slung open his fridge and called out an offering of several different brands of unpalatable lager.</p><p>Zoltan, a pot-bellied, short-statured guy with a balding head that shone with sunburn, offset by a massive, bushy beard. He was a hobbyist forager, crafting niche culinary delights from chanterelles and garlic mustard and autumn onion, and was an abysmal lightweight, hollering red-nosed perched on furniture and having to be coaxed down from city trees and light poles.</p><p>None of them were of a similar age, and none of them looked like an ordinary group strolling down a sidewalk somewhere on a barhopping Friday night, especially when Jaskier began to join them, flouncing all sequined and beglittered ahead of them to lead them to his queer and unusual corners of the city.</p><p>He had to laugh when he thought too hard about it. Geralt and his company. He’d never seen a more blatantly queer assortment of folks (and he had been balls deep in queer circles for almost a decade, to say nothing of the sorts of people who attended his hippie parents' bizarre and elaborate dinner parties, so that was truly saying something), and yet, their grey-haired dork of a foreman who towered over the lot of them continued to play at being straight-laced and boring.</p><p>It was laughable. Jaskier laughed loud and freely about it.</p><p>And it was on one of those nights out with Geralt’s friends that the loud contrast finally made him forget Yennefer’s insistence that he wait, go easy, go slow and not accidentally frighten or distress his friend. It wasn’t their business, not really, she had argued. He doesn’t have the support system. He might balk. He might bail. Who knows what he would do.</p><p>But Geralt so clearly did have the support. He had his crew and he had Jaskier and Yen. And it <em>was</em> Jaskier’s business. His friend’s happiness. The night was bright and shimmering and frantic with energy, and Jaskier sipped at a fruity drink and flopped his head against Geralt’s shoulder and thought how he had no clue at all why his dear, dear friend could not just accept this part of himself and move toward the light with so many people who loved him at his side.</p><p>The gay bar of the night was crowded and hopping but he had managed to find Geralt a secluded corner to stand together and sip at their drinks a while, watching the others flit here and there around the crush of gathered bargoers.</p><p>“Geralt, do you think you could be a woman?” Jaskier asked him, trying at directness and bravery, and Geralt looked at him with the hopelessly endearing confusion of a wet-eyed puppydog. He shrugged and grunted and shook his head.</p><p>But Jaskier knew he was thinking about it, that whip-smart brain chugging steadily along.</p><p>“I’m here if you want to talk,” he said. “You know I am. You know I always am.”</p><p>Geralt leaned into Jaskier, slumping, hands catching and entangling. He didn’t have to say anything, just sighed, shuddering and long and tired.</p><p>And held onto his hand.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>fuck bradford pears!!!!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. ignition</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p><b>content warning</b> in this chapter for violence and gore/bodily injury in relation to a car accident (in the past), brief mention of hospitals, mental health struggles (bipolar mania &amp; depression, anxiety, brief suicidal ideation, insomnia), a bit of internalized transphobia, gender nonsense</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p>The last seeping blur of a summertime sky split with a crackling explosion over the backfield. Green fissuring into red into sprays of gold, palm tree like as the next rocket whined along the chugging smoke trunk of the last. Lambert howled and grabbed Eskel by the back of his shirt, slapping him, palming him, and together they scrabbled back up the drive, scattering and crunching gravel, to dip to light the next few. His vision blown out from the crackle of fireworks, Geralt saw them as a quiver of a lighter flame in blackness, the warmed ridges of Lambert’s knuckles and Eskel’s palms cupped to block the breeze hovering detached in a dark nothing, vanishing as the wick caught.</p><p>“FIRE IN THE HOLE,” Lambert hollered, and still caught in the dark of the drive, they scattered, blooming back into sight only for Eskel’s feather-grey t-shirt, full of holes and tugged off one shoulder as Lambert clung and cackled. They met bodily with Geralt and Coen, plowing in, thumping shoulders and hips and tumbling if not for the hands grabbing them up and manhandling them. Would have diverged into full on wrestling but then the next rockets whined and Eskel whooped into the dusk and Lambert yipped like a coyote and Coen punched Lambert in the ribs when he tried to grab at his shirt the way he stretched out Eskel’s and Geralt allowed himself to be clobbered and shook and didn’t make a sound.</p><p>The sparks over their heads bloomed and collided, thunder rolling above the last fade of twilight tickling the edges of the cornfields.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>The bug zapper hissed with moths and the windchimes rattled without chiming and, slumped on Eskel’s futon on the screened in porch, Geralt did not sleep. The others sprawled into lumpy shapes beneath sheets in the dark, even Eskel giving in to the draw of sleeping mostly outside even though he had a perfectly good mattress in the backroom. The lot of them belly-soft and piled close like boys, latching onto what might be the last good outdoors-sleeping summer night. Wick burning down.</p><p>In days past, they would have been hayfield itchy even after a dunk in the river, swinging out into the water from rope swing or railroad bridge, sweat-grimed and work sore, snoring into each other’s bodies and farting and snickering, knowing back to school loomed a week or so out, knowing frost would start sneaking into the dew and leave their porch-sleeping for another year.</p><p>They’d always been real sure that there would be another year.</p><p>Back then, their podunk backwater was anything and everything, complete shit piss awful but grander than the whole damn world, and everyone knew most of these boys wouldn't sling themselves elsewhere, most of these boys wouldn't do anything but ramble from season to season to season for the rest of time. Proudest lifetime achievement how pin straight they could level their windrows and furrows.</p><p>The twins though, everyone always said, those two could go places. Smart as a tack, both of them, usually spouting something so damn smart anyone listening wanted to smack the echo of it from their mouths. Vesemir gave into that temptation more often than he maybe should have, but Geralt didn’t blame him, not really. Raising two upstart clever as shit boys all alone tried his patience and his wallet and his good sense, and he never smacked them around hard enough for the pain to last. Not hard enough for the lesson to settle.</p><p>Potential hummed like the bug zapper swinging outside on the porch awning.</p><p>Fissured and crackled like a windshield giving to the punch of a body.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Geralt creaked out the screendoor, bare tops of his feet chilled in dew, an ache grinding into the bones.</p><p><br/>He knew just how not to make a sound slipping out into the night, but Eskel knew just how to listen for him.</p><p>Catching up to him in the grey dark of the yard, Eskel’s hand cupped over the nape of his neck, thumb on the tendons and stroking, and Geralt leaned into the quiet reassurance of walking arm over shoulders with his brother, sleep shirts skin-warmed and flannel pants catching a soggy drag of wet lawn along the tattered cuffs.</p><p>Used to be easy to conk out and sleep like the dead, used to be Geralt would moan and gripe and groan against stumbling up for chores on days off from school, milking as much passed out drooling dark behind the crack of the curtains in the farmhouse as his teenaged body could manage. He made a habit of snoozing in his folded arms on his desk in his least favorite classes, slammed awake by the teacher’s drop of a textbook to the floor, grunting and slapping at the spittle at the corner of his mouth.</p><p>Geralt didn’t sleep so bad anymore and dropped next to Yen even deeper, breathing into the lilac scent of her, but sometimes it all itched back to life.</p><p>He could mark the start of his insomnia on a calendar, dog-eared and easy to thumb and return to. Boyhood on this side of the white line and sleepless, circling, snap of adulthood on the other.</p><p>Like this:</p><p>Stepped back into the stale air of their shut up bedroom for the first time after the accident. Couldn’t see the floorboards for their piles of laundry. Twin bed on each wall, cut of the curtained window between them, narrow enough to reach across and slap hands. Had thought the wide awake buzz in his head was just from trying to catch some shut eye with the constant bronzed hospital glow spreading under the doorjamb, passing shadows flicking, dim glow and hushed but still bright as a spotlight compared to anywhere he was used to sleeping. Had thought the quiet of the farmhouse would be a relief and that he’d close his eyes and that he’d wake up and reach for his brother’s dangling hand.</p><p>He dreamed without sleeping, thoughts ribboned with images.</p><p>Eskel, sixteen and bubbling against the flat plane of the window and going through. Eskel, splitting like ripe fruit, stinging in the grit of the shoulder. Eskel, moonshine-wet and supposed to be clever, supposed to get out of here, lightning-strike plowing the only tree for miles and miles and miles. Eskel, ragdoll body and viscera, skinned on the slough of the blacktop, frame of the truck folding like paper. Dog-eared.</p><p>His girl was worse off, fourteen and narcotic-skinny and burning toward septic a week after the paramedics scraped both of them off the road. Nobody thought she’d make it, and her parents cussed and wailed and spit at them. <em>Killed our daughter. Killed our little girl. Should have been your kid instead.</em></p><p>The girl lived. Geralt’s brother lived.</p><p>Took up in the trailer on the Morhen property, acting like it wasn’t a permanent fixture, screened-in porch tacked on like an afterthought, scarred but limping free of the wreckage.</p><p>Eskel had lived; he was fine.</p><p>Acting like sprint car cycles on a fine dirt track Saturdays at the speedway got him as far as he ever wanted to go from this town, orbiting, orbiting. Acting like he didn’t need more than his herding dogs and his cars and his potbelly goats. Bourbon and TV dinners, woodsmoke and alfalfa. Windchimes, corn husks, blush of starling-churned sky over the frosted silos. Didn’t need more than that.</p><p>In the blue dark, he walked beside his brother along the swathe of lawn. The closed tight bay of the massive garage loomed, but he didn’t turn toward it. A dog or two whined in the chainlink kennels jutting off the side but didn’t bark up a ruckus as they passed. The cornfields started twenty feet back, rippling in their last touches of green softness.</p><p>Without words, palm fit to the back of Geralt’s neck, Eskel knew where he was headed.</p><p>A gnarled bur oak curved beside the drive, winding tongues of branches sinking up into the star-frothed indigo of the night sky. <em>Quercus marcocarpa</em>, growing backwards through the years, shrinking from the behemoth of their boyhood into something easily measurable and quaint, mysteries catalogued. Geralt knew all the tree’s secrets now, from its taxonomy to its ecological niche, and yet, and yet.</p><p>His toes met the roots in the dark without seeing a lick of them, packed dirt and gnarl of knots, catching rough on his callouses. He slumped at the base of the tree, ass to a hollow where it used to fit snug, dragging Eskel down with him, shoulder to thigh. The twisted bark rubbed through his thin shirt, and he thumped his head back to feel it on his scalp. Way overhead, a cicada roared.</p><p>“Thought you got better with the sleeping,” said his brother at last.</p><p>“I did. I’m better,” said Geralt. “It’s quieter out here. Not so used to it anymore.”</p><p>“City slicker,” Eskel jeered.</p><p>“Yeah, yeah.”</p><p>Sixteen and his brother cracked through a windshield, future evaporating like liquid from the busted innards of his old truck. Geralt’s brain forgot how to quit ticking, always lights on and rattling. Twenty-three and things went tits up and he ditched his grad program and drove ten hours to confess it first to his brother, the only person in the whole world he’d wanted to do proud and failed and failed. It was supposed to be one of them. It was supposed to be Eskel. Geralt’s brain forgot how to do anything but rest, muted and turned off, a long drag of numbness like nothing else.</p><p>“You met somebody?” asked Eskel, thumb still caught on the jackrabbit of Geralt’s pulse.</p><p>“Yeah, she’s--” He didn’t have the words for Yen, couldn’t say what it was. She was beautiful, sure, starkly beautiful and knew it, but there was more to it than that. Woke him up and settled him all at once. “--she’s somebody.”</p><p>“Geralt, if it gets bad again, you can tell me,” said Eskel, and Geralt had to really focus to see him in the dark, the curve of his profile, the wisp of the long tufts of hair against his neck, smelling like tobacco and bourbon and Zippo lighter fluid. Heart to hearts weren’t something they tended toward, tripping into jokes or bullshitting instead of anything raw. “You gotta tell me, I mean. I’ll listen.”</p><p>“It won’t get bad,” he lied, because how could anyone promise anything like that? Any spark could fizzle to wisps of smoke, usual and quiet and then brain on fire. The way it happened to his mother.</p><p>The way it happened to Renfri.</p><p>Geralt closed his eyes, and the evening’s fireworks still spit as afterimages over the dark canvas of his lids. He could pretend they were still boys snuck out from their granddaddy’s house with the calendar about to tip into fall. Could pretend it was possible to shrug back into that boyhood promise of another year, another summer. Didn’t matter if this one ended. Able to go back up to that farmhouse, to those twin beds, always close enough to reach and touch his brother’s hand.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Last Friday night, in the sequin shine of a gay bar, Jaskier had leaned close to ask him <em>do you think you could be a woman?</em></p><p>What did Geralt know about any of that?</p><p>What did it mean for their shared boyhood if Geralt had never felt at home in it, never knew what it meant? What did it mean to have a twin brother who encapsulated all the facets and nuances of masculinity that Geralt fumbled and failed to grasp at? What would it have been like if one of them had been born different, brother and sister, paths separate and fracturing and broken from one another’s orbit by the swell and growth of their bodies? Would they still sit here under this tree, roots and dark cradling like the womb?</p><p>And what would it mean for nights like this going forward, for their brotherhood, for the close-knit rabble of noise-making boys pretending summer would always tick round again? Could Geralt still slip into the easy shrug and tumble of old trouble-making soulmates? Rest beside them, know them, shit talk and prod them?</p><p>Could <em>she</em>?</p><p>“Eskel,” said Geralt, voice rough and low. “Yen’s different. Than other women.”</p><p>“Real sweet, bud. Real tender. You becoming a romantic in your old age?”</p><p>“Said you’d listen, asshole.”</p><p>“Yeah, I did. Yeah.”</p><p>“She’s not-- she wasn’t--”</p><p>Nobody else was here, so he didn’t have to struggle so hard for the proper vocab, no one to correct or tease or take offense, and Eskel knew about Jaskier well enough, had already had the ins and outs explained to him. But it didn’t feel right to talk about Yen as anything other than what she was now. She referred to her past self as a little girl, said some part of her had always known, always been Yennefer.</p><p>Geralt couldn’t recall ever thinking anything like what he was thinking now.</p><p>What did he know about girlhood? Womanhood? What could anyone know?</p><p>“Yen’s a woman, but she was born-- She was raised--”</p><p>“Ah,” said Eskel, smart as a whip, clever as a billy goat, “she’s transgender?”</p><p>“Yeah,” he said with the gust of an exhaled breath.</p><p>“Aw hell, you thought I’d give a tit about that? She’s your girl. I’m not an asshole.”</p><p>“That’s not it.”</p><p>“Then what, Geralt? Then what?"</p><p>A breeze swelled and rippled through the leaves of the bur oak and knocked the windchimes on the porch into a tangle of soft sounds. Well away across the plains, past the silos, heat lightning flickered in a greyed bank of clouds.</p><p>“What if,” said Geralt, throat catching on all that potential, fork of a dirt road, high tension wire fizzle.</p><p>“What if.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0013"><h2>13. confession</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I.</p><p> </p><p><em>What a bizarre rabble Geralt has gathered around him,</em> Yennefer thought as she settled cross-legged on the floor of Geralt’s living room before them, half-hidden by the cardboard privacy screen that concealed her scrawled game notes and figures and die casts. This was a tabletop game of her own invention, spun up and hammered out on late tech school nights she should have been in the computer lab. She was defensive of it, hoping to make bank someday selling it to some game company. The rules stayed password protected and encrypted on her computer, and now none of the fuckstrels she had finally allowed to play the game were even interested in playing.</p><p>The attention span in the room had waned.</p><p>What a strange fucking rabble.</p><p>Cahir dipped his chubby fingers into the paper of a hand-rolled cigarette, shaking off little flecks of tobacco back into the tin. Zoltan stole pinches while the younger man’s focus zeroed into rolling and puffed at the mouth of his lacquered pipe.</p><p>Milva was perched awkwardly on the couch and engaged in an animated discussion about local fungi with Regis, who politely attempted to both listen to her and stay attentive to Yen’s game.</p><p>Geralt seemed genuinely interested in the mechanics of the game, rattling his die in his big hands and squinting at his character sheet, but even he could not stay focused for long.</p><p>“Hey Geralt, are these anal beads?” drawled a drunk Jaskier, poking at a dangling plant in the window. He was promptly wrestled away, wriggling in a headlock. No touchy. “I wonder what that would--”</p><p>“No ass insertion.”</p><p>“Are you sure? They look--”</p><p>“String of Pearls. Please don’t put them in your butt.”</p><p>“What the hell is wrong with you?” slurred Milva, almost toppling backwards off the couch.</p><p>“A lot!” said the idiot sunnily.</p><p>Yennefer coughed.</p><p>“Ahem, it’s your roll, dumbass.”</p><p>“Whose roll? That covers a lot of bases, Yen. Whose turn is it?”</p><p>“I went last. Or maybe Regis did. I don’t know, but Geralt, do you have beer that doesn’t suck?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“Ha! Admit your beer sucks then.”</p><p>“Your mom sucks.”</p><p>“Nevermind, you’re all hopeless. You all fucking suck. Even amounts of suck divided all around.”</p><p>“Yen--”</p><p>The commotion was interrupted by Roach hacking something up in the corner, which prompted a series of concerned and disgusted shouts.</p><p>“She ate your anal beads, Geralt.”</p><p>“You broke off a piece, dumbass. That’s why we don’t--”</p><p>“Is she dying? Did I kill her? Is Roach going to make it?”</p><p>“That’s what anal beads do to you, Jask. You barf on the floor and then die.”</p><p>“Shut up, Cahir. Shut up and go back to Nilfgaard.”</p><p>“I’m not from Nilfgaard, I’m from--”</p><p>“She’s fine, Jaskier. No one’s dying.”</p><p>“Except the anal beads plant. Looks a little worse for wear.”</p><p>"It's not anal beads. It's a <em>Senecio</em>-- oh no, they changed the nomenclature, didn't they? It's a <em>Curio rowleyanus."</em></p><p>"There! See! Anal beads. I was right. Don't look at me like that, Geralt. I'm always right."</p><p> </p><p>II.</p><p> </p><p>Out back, the stars did their best to gleam through a haze of light pollution, trees that clung to the hillside behind the old house leaving only a small patch of sky for star-gazing.</p><p>Roach, seemingly wholly recovered, skittered after a thrown ball over and over in the black yard, light over the crumbling back stoop sending out a half-moon of yellow light that the brown dog leapt out of and re-appeared in again and again.</p><p>Jaskier slumped on the stoop, face pressed against the chill of the wrought-iron railing and blew a plume of vapor into the flutter of craneflies in the halo of the backyard light. Geralt’s arm cocked back to throw the ball again, a whistle of sound in the mostly hushed night, and Roach launched herself and raced into the dark, muscled legs jerking and catching the ball in her teeth with an audible snap.</p><p>Inside, the rabble had switched their attention to a card game, favorite of Zoltan, that involved a fair amount of hand-slapping and cussing and shouting.</p><p>Geralt lit a cigarette, orange pinprick all that Jaskier could see of his face beneath the cowl of his sweatshirt hood. He’d been home for the long weekend and driven back yesterday, and he looked more haunted than usual, same as he did every time he went home.</p><p>“Thought you quit.”</p><p>“Thought you did.”</p><p>“Yeah,” said Jaskier and released a cloud of vape smoke. Cookies and cream flavor. Like burnt sugar. “You doing ok?”</p><p>“You told me,” said Geralt, his throat clicking, his voice coming out further deepened with smoke. “You told me if I wanted to talk…”</p><p>“Of course,” said Jaskier, words dwarfed with sincerity, small and serious. He bumped his scrawny shoulder against Geralt’s warm bulk. “Of course.”</p><p>“I told my brother,” he said.</p><p>“You told him what exactly.”</p><p>Geralt paused to bend and fish down in the crabgrass for the drool-slick ball Roach discarded at his feet and let it sail away into the dark.</p><p>“Told him what you asked me.”</p><p>Jaskier’s memory was a sieve, leaky and unreliable, and he didn’t have a clue what he had asked.</p><p>“I’m sorry, Geralt, you’re going to have to be more--”</p><p>“Told him I might be a woman. Or I asked him. What it would mean. You know. What if.”</p><p>“Oh,” said Jaskier. “Oh.”</p><p>“Eskel said he’d-- fuck, Jaskier, he’d said he’d guessed.”</p><p>“Oh,” he said again, stupid gust of breath, rare loss for words, his brain a mess of scrambled thoughts. <em>Oh Geralt</em>.</p><p>“Said he’d thought about it. After I met you, I guess. After Ren-- after I dropped out. Other times, probably.”</p><p>“Oh Geralt, he didn’t say anything cruel, did he?”</p><p>“Course not. Of course not,” grunted Geralt. “He’s my brother. He’s Eskel. He’s-- Said I reminded him too much of Mama-- of our mother. Said I’d always be-- but I don’t know. I don’t fucking know, Jaskier.”</p><p>Turned away from the back light, Jaskier couldn’t see the twist of Geralt’s mouth, but he felt the tremble of the body beside him on the porch steps.</p><p>“Don’t know what?” he breathed against his shoulder, chin resting against the swell of his arm.</p><p>“Don’t know what’s meant to happen. What’s next. How to--”</p><p>“We can find you someone to talk to about it, yeah? Someone professional,” said Jaskier.</p><p>“Don’t know how anyone does any of it. I’m not like you. Not like Yen. Not brave like that.”</p><p>“You’re plenty like us. Plenty brave just talking about it.”</p><p>“I don’t even know for sure. I don’t what any of it fucking means.”</p><p>“No one does, Geralt. None of us do.”</p><p> </p><p>III.</p><p> </p><p>The screen door creaked open behind them, and Geralt swiveled to see Yen step through like a shadow, bare-legged and barefoot. His gaze caught on the little pudge of her stomach revealed by her crop top and ached to press his face into it, eyes burning a little at the corners. <em>From the smoke,</em> he thought, but then Yen stepped closer and slipped a hand into his hair, and the waterworks came on. Nothing he could do to stop it.</p><p>Jaskier octopused around his arm in an instant, cooing, and Geralt wasn’t high up on the stairs to press his face into Yennefer’s belly like he wanted so settled for the cool skin of her thigh instead, his stubble catching, her hand tightening in his hair.</p><p>“Sorry for listening,” she said, and he clenched against a fresh wave of whatever the fuck this was, creased brow pressed to the fat of her leg. At his feet, Roach whined and prodded the ball against the ties of his shoes, giving up and lapping at his bare leg.</p><p>“It’s fine,” he said, something heavy caught in his throat and choking. “<em>Yen.</em>”</p><p>“I’m here.” She crouched and held him twisted around, his cheek smushed under the underwire of her bra, shirt riding up. He knew she dabbed perfume on her sternum between the part of her breasts and breathed deep, lilac-scented and familiar. “We’re here.”</p><p>“Yen, I’m-- I think that I’m--”</p><p>“I know,” said Yen.</p><p>Under the bur oak snug beside his brother, the words had been easier to whisper, childhood secrets tangled in the roots and kept there. The world fissuring like a split branch. He’d never had a girlhood and never would. He’d had a good a boyhood as anyone could have. But everything went slippery. It was not one path and the other but a deep words labyrinth of mess out there.</p><p>He mouthed the word <em>woman</em> between Yen’s breasts like an incantation. She had drawn herself up out of the clay and held him like she could do the same. Or teach him how. She and Jaskier both.</p><p>“A woman,” he said into the midnight hum of the backyard, tethered to the earth by these two people. “A woman.”</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0014"><h2>14. womanhood - part 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>here, have a <a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/34OjUu5axDi1vfaZseDXj0?si=rfJdxboCTQG80g202Nu5oQ">playlist</a> for the next few chapters</p><p><b>content warnings</b> for the next nine parts for references to car accidents, gore, alcohol use and abuse, self-harm, drug use, familial abuse, intersex corrective surgery, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, mental health issues (PTSD and general trauama, insomnia, bipolar disorder, mania, depression, suicidal ideation, and of course, of course, dysphoria)</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p>I.</p><p>Mama in the flitting haze of fresh-cut grass prickling their folded legs in the lawn, Mama ginger-haired and freckled even on the pale fish belly of her thighs hollowing out of her cut-offs, Mama ruffling the fresh buzz of his head, russet color of a peach and sweet and soft, her little white hand making him feel big and grown-up. <em>Just like Mama</em>, the farmhands drawled and spit off the porch, hocking and hacking in their dip and smoke. <em>Little ginge gonna grow up just like his little Mama. Too smart for his own damn good.</em> Mama wanting to cuss them out but pinching her lips for his sake even though he and his brother already knew how to say worse, echoing and cackling in the secret warmth of their shared bed. <em>Shit piss and damn,</em> said Eskel with his chilly nose pressed into the chicken wing of Geralt’s shoulder, feeling out the reverberated vocabulary of proper menfolk. <em>Cock-sucking whore.</em></p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0015"><h2>15. womanhood - part 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>II.</p><p>The first and truest mark of coalescing manhood: hunting license pinned to their breast pockets, orange and Realtree coveralls, billow of white breaths into the shivering boughs of the trees. Still small enough to fit pinched shoulder to shoulder on one rickety deerstand, shrugged down below the blind. Thirteen and deemed old enough by the state to solo hunt through their very first deer season, Vesemir trudging out with them in the pitch-black across the ridgeline of the property, saluting his two boys crooked in the tree before trudging on.</p><p>So long potshots at groundhogs, the stuff of boys.</p><p>Now, manhood, cold and hard as the barrel of a Winchester, proud and pluming like their chilled breath, still and patient in the stand, twisting in the prong of a buck’s white-bone antler. They made a pact, a plan, a truce that one would be the eyes and the other the shot. Eskel dug his chin into Geralt’s shoulder to doze a while, a long stream of sun fingering the ruts of the spent cornfield that gave to their windbreak treeline.</p><p>A lone buck rose like a shadow and picked along the uneven ground. Its coat the color of a wet paperbag, its antlers knit like a crown. Close enough to see its jaw move as it chewed, to see the clove of its hoof.</p><p>Not waking his brother, Geralt watched manhood slip specter-like past their hiding spot and continue on down the field.</p><p>Some time later, a shot.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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<a name="section0016"><h2>16. womanhood - part 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p>III.</p><p> </p><p>Deidre. She got caught in Eskel’s teeth, mean and skinny, wolf-hungry and as likely to gnaw on his spent bones as know how to love him. She was fourteen and Eskel rattling the bars of his last summer being fifteen, saving up wages for that ugly orange truck, pacing and gnashing his teeth and finally bursting free in mid-July in a spray of fireworks, sixteen, sixteen, and riding out along the backroads howling out the window and kicking up dust.</p><p>Geralt earned his license with less fanfare. Didn’t have a girl to go plow down to the trailer park and pick up. Been driving all across the farm property since they could see over the wheel, and the private roads that cut and bumped along the fields were grander than anything that smoothed through town. Besides, anywhere one twin went, the other followed.</p><p>But then, Deidre. Petite enough to put in your pocket, over-straightened hair, cussing worse than any old farmhand and slapping his brother on the shoulder, barking laugh and horse teeth. She climbed Eskel like a junkyard fence and scratched and clawed. She eclipsed everything before and after her.</p><p>Deidre. Pretty little country thing in the cracked leather seat, cliche as a dozen crooned ballads. The slick of a glass jar cupped and swigged, catching the spittle of their lips as the cab bounced. The harvest moon glowing gold like a cat’s eye. The rust smeared in the roadside grit. Her body fawn-little, all crook-legged and splintered. His brother’s bulk spilling around her, trying one last time to hold her in a pool of himself. Everything shredded all at once like she’d gutted him with a knife. Everything eclipsed.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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<a name="section0017"><h2>17. womanhood - part 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p>IV.</p><p> </p><p>Jaskier knocked into his life at full speed, starting with an all caps Facebook message the instant the school announced roommate assignments. All theater kid vibrato, prep school haughty sniffing, judgmental hair tosses. A picture of contrasts wearing little ascots and riding pants, hair stiffly coifed, while he dug through the teeming mass of clothing and detritus that buried his side of the room and crept toward Geralt’s spotless half like an inevitable wave. Vesemir would have beat his ass halfway to Sunday for living in filth, shook him hollering <em>know you were born and raised in a goddamn barn, boy, but under my roof, you’re goin’ to show some goddamn respect.</em></p><p>Jaskier scattered, ricocheted, and jittered. He buzzed like a constant caffeine high, his hands moving quick when he spoke, exaggerating every expression, flitting like an insect, and Geralt needed a nap just watching him too long.</p><p>At orientation, the little gaggle of barely adults with their folders and their pens had confused Geralt for one of the parents. His hair, sparsely flecked with a flyaway grey or two before that summer when he was sixteen and his brother tried to die on him, had gone white at the roots and spread. A week ago, Eskel’s fist had tensed in Geralt’s hair as he slipped a knife through the last red threads, the last remnant of Mama, the last flicker of boyhood promise. Now, the grey sat in curls over the crown of his head, hadn’t known it was so curly, the sides neatly buzzed.</p><p>Jaskier knew him, spilled up to him with a cocksure grin and stuck out a rod-straight arm with soft-palmed hand. Geralt’s only profile photo showed a gangly redhead crouched in the leaf litter to hold up the slack head of an eight-point, flash catching in the pupils and dusting orbs through the evening behind them. He’d bulked up, greyed out, gone sour.</p><p>Jaskier had studied the grainy face long enough to recognize him. Jaskier, determined to know him and needling ever deeper. Jaskier, all careful control of his singing voice and prose and frazzled chaos through the rest of it. All color and noise. All distraction and contrast. Geralt closed his eyes and clung.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0018"><h2>18. womanhood - part 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p>V.</p><p> </p><p>Jaskier told him later that he had been terrified beyond reason. No singles for freshmen, no exceptions, and he was legally stamped M on all official documents, clearly no woman, no chance of rooming in the girl’s dorms. Nothing for it but charging ahead full force. No surprises. Loud and honest from the start and maybe the stranger would return the favor maybe, maybe.</p><p>Jaskier explained it to Geralt in his very first introduction like he was some dumb hick, picture-book simple.</p><p>
  <em>I never felt like a woman, but when I had the space to try things out, I definitely felt like a man. I hope this doesn’t make things uncomfortable. Please be honest. - J</em>
</p><p>
  <em>honest. it doesnt - geralt</em>
</p><p>And Geralt told him far later that his first thought then was <em>tell me what it feels like. To know something like that. Tell me.</em> And Jaskier, laughing, said <em>glad you didn’t ask me that because trust me, love, I had no fuckin’ clue. Still don’t.</em></p><p>Jaskier unrolled white stockings up the pale give of his calves. He darkened his lids with a smear of kohl, sprayed glitter in his hair. But this wasn’t womanhood, the dark tufts of chest hair in the swoop of his neckline, the wispy stubble of his mustache. But this wasn’t a manhood that Geralt had ever known or witnessed. This wasn’t the weight of a bullet dropped into his hand, tobacco and moonshine, grease stains and diesel exhaust.</p><p>This was something new.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
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<a name="section0019"><h2>19. womanhood - part 6</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p></p><div class="ujudUb">
  <p>
    <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sskFjbHu_W0">
      <em>When I try to open up to you I get completely lost</em>
    </a>
    <br/>
    <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sskFjbHu_W0">
      <em>Houses swallowed by the earth, windows thick with frost</em>
    </a>
    <br/>
    <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sskFjbHu_W0">
      <em>And I reach deep down within, but the pathways twist and turn</em>
    </a>
    <br/>
    <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sskFjbHu_W0">
      <em>And there's no light anywhere, and nothing left to burn</em>
    </a>
  </p>
</div><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>VI.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Renfri. Tomboy drawl in the back of his organic chem lecture, nicotine buzz hanging off the wire railing on the stoop after class. Combat boots, messy chin-length curls, rugby-broad and smoky-voiced.</p><p>Renfri, whose daddy’s name was on the business school, who middle-fingered her way past the etched letters every time. Renfri, who caught lunch with him in the cafe in the STEM building and kicked him under the table and stole his fries and wiggled her hands into his sweatshirt pocket to nab his Marlboro Reds.</p><p>Renfri, whiskey-wet and red-mouthed, kissing him in the middle of the street on a 2am walk to the gas station. Renfri, her dark curls tumbled with snow that he brushed out, the sleepless bruises under her eyes that echoed his, the snow white skin, the blood-red lips, the red, red notches on her open wrists that she offered to him. His mouth catching the crust of fresh scars. <em>Kiss it better</em>, Mama used to say and Geralt tried, he tried, he kissed her like a resuscitation, like he could draw her curse out from the wound like a snake bite, like he could scale the dark, bloodied tower of her body and kiss her whole and reborn.</p><p>Renfri went dark like the other side of the moon.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0020"><h2>20. womanhood - part 7</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>VII.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Renfri, who whispered to him in his twin bed how her daddy held her newborn in his skeletal hands and told the surgeons where to place their knife. Born liminal, straddling the line of male and female. Intersex, she called it. Rearranged and shaken out and pinned flat on a board from the very beginning. She said, <em>my daddy never stopped looking at me like something monstrous was about to bust free</em>.</p><p>Renfri shook at night in his arms, and they woke hollowed around each other with their sweaty temples fixed together and their nailbeds digging. Geralt leaned to whisper against her forehead someday a little house after all this, someday a slow-swinging hammock beneath the willows, someday a bank of roses and our dogs stirring the cut grass, someday we’ll carve out something better, make that choice.</p><p>Renfri melted like a sugar cube in black tea. Renfri spun out, dizzy and overheated. She called from back home one winter and said <em>I’m not coming back. They won’t let me come back, and I can’t come back. And I’m not coming back anyway.</em></p><p>Renfri’s brain hummed like an old truck greased with moonshine, careening lightning-strike sure toward the edge of the road. She vanished like high-pressure steam released from the cracked shell of a machine settling into heat death.</p><p>The girl lived, or so they said. He spoke to her one last time on a blue sky autumn afternoon on the brink of campus, thinking how he could smell the fires on the west coast from way out here. No body to bury, no ashes to scatter, no villain to fight. Cradling the elbow of the phone against his cheek like it was her ghost-white hand, fitting himself into the creases of her knuckles, match-strike flicked against the meat of his skull, brain on fire.</p><p>Just like Mama, he burned to rubble. Just like Renfri, he went dark.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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<a name="section0021"><h2>21. womanhood - part 8</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p>VIII.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Yennefer wore black, knee-high socks with pink cat faces on them, hugged up and framing her shapely calves even when they had sex, wrapped delicately around the bulk of him. She’d missed out on all the best things of girlhood but clung to them now, her apartment awash in pastel colors and neon, her surfaces cluttered with magical girl figurines, her walls splashed with anime posters, bed piled with a menagerie of plushies. Yennefer curled around a unicorn body pillow rather than him at night, her long body spooned in a shadowed contrast against its white fur, hands fisted in its pale purple rope mane.</p><p>Yennefer smoked a lot of weed from a dainty blown pipe, and he told her <em>Syringa vulgaris</em>, common lilac, was what she smelled like even down there in the musk-sweat of her parted legs, and she said I fucking better that shit I buy’s expensive. And he told her, sorry Yen, sorry but what the fuck does a gooseberry smell like, and the face she pulled knocked his big, dumb heart right against his ribs. Gooseberries are illegal some places, he told her through wet kisses on her thigh. Spread some disease to lumber trees. I’ll show you lumber, big boy, said Yennefer, which didn’t make a shred of sense but got him hot anyway, chubbing up just hearing the low, rich sound of her voice, getting him flushed and pink like a little kid again.</p><p>Yennefer left black lipstick stains on his crotch, laughing at the oil mark remnant of her kiss in the white tuft of his pubic hair, and she said, my favorite colors, look at you. You’re all black and white and halfway to violet. Geralt huffed and said if it’s purple down there, I’m sending you the medical bills, and she kissed him on the ruddy skin of his erection, hot red more than purple, and slicked down his foreskin real slow. Like the skin of a grape, she said, and her black-smeared smile was all teeth.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0022"><h2>22. womanhood - part 9</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>IX.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>If he could have chosen, he would have--</p><p>If there was just a switch somewhere in his brain, right under some grey fold or another, right there somewhere he could thumb at and point to and dissect--</p><p>If he could close his eyes and make a wish and click his heels and drive around the plains like he and his granddad and Eskel used to after big storms and ooh and ahh and tut over the downed wires and the busted silos and the flooded out rows of soybeans and alfalfa and if he could just no place like home his way into a new body, new life, new brain--</p><p>If he had three wishes, maybe one of them would be--</p><p>But no, he’d spend them up on other people. He smeared himself thin like Mama used to like her toast, burnt to hell until it crumbled and slathered with the thinnest smear of apricot jam. He’d wished years and years that his Mama would come home, not daring to whisper it out loud, unless it came true and he trapped her here with them and--</p><p>He’d wished for hours and hours after Vesemir dragged him out of the farmhouse, screendoor slapping, dogs barking into the black before dawn, yellow stoplights blinking over the intersections while he slumped down in the passenger seat, speeding toward the county hospital with his granddad swearing like he never did, saying <em>your brother’s done some stupid fucking shit this time your brother’s really fucking done it oh Lord have some mercy on these idiot boys I did my best didn’t I? I did what I goddamn could I--</em></p><p>He’d wished into Renfri’s whiskey-sour mouth, burning his fingertips raw on the smoldering center of her, wishing he was smaller so he could tuck right under the swell of her arms, wishing he was little and she could reach all the way around him snug like a seatbelt, wishing she could fit him in the palm of her hands and condense him to nothing and keep him as a living, miniature reminder of how marrow-deep, metronome-sure, aimed true somebody loved her--</p><p>If he could have chosen, he wouldn’t have loomed and would have taken up less space and had hands that fit easy between the spaces of somebody’s fingers and not been so heavy that he sank down and down and down--</p><p>If he could have--</p><p>If she could--</p><p>If she.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0023"><h2>23. affirmation</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p>The doctor had a large peach-colored loveseat and squared off glasses and subtle pinstripe pantyhose with a catch on the upper shin of her crossed legs. Geralt stared at the defect in the thin fabric rather than look the doctor in the eye before remembering what people tended to think about someone staring at a woman’s legs.</p><p>“So, Renfri was a catalyst,” the doctor was saying, her thin lips stretching around the name in a way that felt strange. “You had built a framework for your life before her and then around her, and when she was suddenly no longer there, you experienced a lengthy depressive episode.”</p><p><em>Brain on fire</em>, thought Geralt. <em>Went dark.</em></p><p>“It wasn’t her fault,” said Geralt.</p><p>“No, of course not,” the doctor said, “and it wasn’t yours either.”</p><p>“I didn’t know how to help her.”</p><p>“You barely knew how to help yourself. It wasn’t your fault. No one can fight a fire with more flames.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Afterward, Yen met Geralt in the parking lot, Roach wiggling on a leash in her hand. The bright red of a row of young Winterking Hawthorns blazed behind her, a shock against the grey sky. Fallen leaves crunched under their boots as she snugged their arms together.</p><p>“How was shrink talk?”</p><p>It had taken multiple sessions to hash it all out and would likely take more, disjointed and rattling with compounding traumas. Mama’s brain and Eskel’s accident and Renfri’s vanishing. A map from boyhood to womanhood scrawled in the doctor’s neat hand.</p><p>“Intolerable,” said Geralt. “Just kill me now.”</p><p>“None of that, you big wuss.”</p><p>“Don’t tell me you love therapy.”</p><p>Yennefer snorted. “I wouldn’t say that, but I do like talking shit about my stepdad. And having someone politely smile and nod when I say crazy shit.”</p><p>“I politely smile and nod when you say crazy shit.”</p><p>“You’re obligated to. You’re my girlfriend.”</p><p><em>Girlfriend. Girlfriend.</em> Even though they’d discussed trying it out at length, the word punched like an electric shock. Warmth crept up from Geralt’s fingertips to wind-blustered cheek.</p><p>Yennefer noticed, watching carefully, the flat of her palm a warm weight. They were nearly of the same height, but Yen seemed to loom taller, held perfectly straight-backed and shored up against the world. When she walked in public, she dared anyone to look at her and see anything but what she was. Geralt had never seen anything but what Yennefer was.</p><p>“Yeah,” she said, holding Yen’s thin arm in the crook of hers. “You’re not wrong.”</p><p>She leaned to press her mouth against the soft hair at Yennefer’s temple, hitched awkward by the pace of their walk.</p><p>Yen tugged, turning her around to kiss her good and proper. A crisp wind tangled their hair together, Yen’s loose waves and Geralt’s frizz of silver, and Roach whined and plopped her ass on their feet.</p><p>She could feel the weight of all of it, snapping in the static crackle of the air.</p><p>She breathed easy into the hum of the kiss.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0024"><h2>24. recognition</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The farmhouse crested the low ripple of a ridgeline, yellow sugar maples shivering behind the weathered boards, golden leaves flattened wet along the roof of the wraparound porch. Gravel scattered from the tread of the truck and stilled, the door swinging to let loose a little brown dog that shot like a cannon up the walk.</p><p>Geralt followed after the dog-shaped blur with a scuff of boots on the packed earth, feeling adolescent timid again, like it was past nine on a school night and granddad’s silhouette creaked up there in his rocking chair as a silent threat soon to offload.</p><p>A touch of shame burned over being cowardly enough to ask Eskel to ease the way for this. Her brother owed it to her after all the years and years she did it for him, saying to Vesemir things like <em>don’t be too mad, pops, it was Coen’s idea in the first place and everybody’s all in one piece except the old skid bucket but Eskel will have it all fixed up this weekend, he promises.</em></p><p>She doesn’t want to think what Eskel had said, had been told only the the conversation went smooth and easy and not to worry, not to worry, the old man would be up at the house all day now that the harvest was done and he’d made deadly clear he wanted Geralt to come and see him.</p><p>Talk face to face. Newborn woman to man.</p><p>Geralt stopped at the slatted porch stairs and smiled at Roach stepping her muddy paws all over Vesemir’s muck boots and torn knees of his jeans, refraining from leaping into his lap in the rocking chair only for the man’s low <em>brrrs</em> and whistles.</p><p>“She missed you,” said Geralt and looked at Vesemir straight on for the first time in a long while. Her granddad looked more white-haired than he had, more grooved along the edges of his bristled moustache.</p><p>It had been rocky the last few years.</p><p>Eskel had eased the way back then too, saying <em>hey pops, Geralt’s decided to quit doing grad school, yeah I know, I know</em>. Vesemir had had nothing but hope for his secondhand boys, had been tough sometimes but never mean, and if it wasn’t going to be Eskel who tripped out into the world and climbed the ladder, it had to be Geralt, it had to be, it had to be.</p><p>Standing on the lip of the porch, Geralt found she couldn’t quite remember why she’d been so piss-scared to tell her granddaddy about something as commonplace as being a dropout and a failure. She thought of Yen, who could have been a surgeon but had had life’s circumstances tug that thread away from her.</p><p><em>You would not call Yennefer a failure, would you?</em> her doctor’s soft voice echoed in her head. <em>Then why do you see failure in the circumstances beyond your own control?</em></p><p>The fear she burned with now looking at Vesemir was of standing still and letting him look back. It eclipsed her old terror over facing ruined expectations with white-hot new ones.</p><p>Maybe she didn’t look too different, same boots, same old jeans, same hands shoved in pockets. She’d had Yen braid her hair this morning across the crown of her head, but the long drive and the humidity had frizzed out grey flyaways here and there and her scalp had started to itch something awful so she’d tugged the braids out in a gas station parking lot, running her fingers through crimped curls.</p><p>Maybe she looked the same, weird and hunched, shadow of stubble coming in along her jaw, muddy dog prints on her grey sweatshirt.</p><p>“One time, your Mama got into trouble,” began Vesemir, gruff voice easing into the swell of story-telling, eagle eyes trapping Geralt into listening close like a field mouse huddled down in the grass. “She must have been thirteen or so. Ran the quad right into the back pasture fence and let out half the heifers. Spent most of the day pushing them back in.”</p><p>Geralt had heard the story before, remembered it told by an older farmhand in full color, heavy with cusswords.</p><p>“After all of it, she come up here to the house looking like I was going to toss her to the dogs,” said Vesemir, “and I did, I was getting after her, really telling her how much of an idiot she’d been to do something so stupid and reckless like that and then not have the balls to come tell us straightaway so those heifers were halfway to town by the time we knew.”</p><p>He paused to spit out over the porch railing, still looking steady at Geralt.</p><p>“But then, I noticed how she was favoring her arm. Turns out, she’d broken it falling off the quad and been hiding it for hours, the whole time catchin’ the cattle and afterward. That’s what really got me going.”</p><p>The bruised sky low over the spent cornfields promised heavier rain, for now only a fine mist caught in the autumn breeze. Geralt ducked her shoulders against the chill of it, wishing she’d worn a rain jacket, wishing for a mug of hot cider pressed into her hands in the farmhouse kitchen, the wind groaning over the eaves but not touching her.</p><p>“You look just like she did then,” said Vesemir. “You look just like your Mama.”</p><p>Her granddaddy stood on creaking joints and beckoned with both arms spread low and palms facing her, clear a gesture as any.</p><p>She stepped up into the shadow of the porch.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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<a name="section0025"><h2>25. transformation</h2></a>
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    <p> </p><p> </p><p>Yennefer’s phone trilled.</p><p>She stretched a hand from her bed to slap at it on the floor until she managed to pinch it in her fingers, her other hand busy tugging at the mop of brown hair that bobbed between her splayed legs.</p><p>
  <strong>Want 2 go 2 pumpkin patch ? - geralt</strong>
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  <strong>Bring j. - geralt</strong>
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  <strong>❤︎ - geralt</strong>
</p><p>“Jaskier,” she said, pulling harder at his fringe. “Hurry up, Geralt wants to do basic white girl fall shit.”</p><p>To her frustration, rather than buckle down, he pulled away with a wet pop.</p><p>“I’ll pumpkin your spice, baby,” he drawled, eyes hooded. She cuffed him.</p><p>“I hate you,” said Yennefer. “You’re truly insufferable. If it weren’t for Geralt, I would sell you to the circus without hesitation.”</p><p>“I love you too, Yen,” said Jaskier and pressed the wet smack of a kiss onto the pudge of her belly and promptly got back to the important work of getting her off.</p><p> </p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p> </p><p>The farm market was the sort that had been swallowed by the sprawl of the suburbs and tipped toward overpriced lattes and tourist attractions rather than fade into pastoral history. A gift shop barn glared fresh red over a clutter of shops and food stands, an idling tractor hitched to a trailer full of straw waiting to bumble out on a loop of the orchards for the next scheduled hayride. The “pumpkin patch” consisted of a tumble of orange squash mounded neatly in a swathe of green lawn, not a vine or root to speak of.</p><p>Remembering with amusement the pig-stink mornings of her bitter childhood, Yennefer leaned over a low fence to pat the bristled head of a grunting potbelly pig. Beside her, Jaskier wrinkled his nose, shivering in his thin oatmeal sweater and fashionable leggings.</p><p>“I’m cold.”</p><p>“It’s October,” said Yennefer. “Wear real clothes next time.”</p><p>“Where’s Geralt?”</p><p>“Still in line.”</p><p>“We should have just gone to Starbucks, I swear.”</p><p>“Starbucks may have been more authentic.”</p><p>“This smells pretty authentic to me. Can we wait somewhere that isn’t the pig pen?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“You just like to see me suffer. You just want me to be freezing and afflicted by horrible smells.”</p><p>“I do, actually. It’s very pleasurable.”</p><p>Further bickering was interrupted by the sight of Geralt returning across the gravel lot, a caddy of hot drinks in one hand and a greasy paper bag of apple cider donuts in the other.</p><p>Yennefer took a moment to just drink her in.</p><p>Her undercut was freshly shaved, ears reddened by the cold, and she had fumblingly tried out some of the subtle tricks of cosmetics that Yennefer had been teaching her. Nothing that looked a thing like makeup, simply a touch of concealer and color correction to mask stubble, a smear of highlight to soften the rough angles that soon enough hormones would do the brunt of softening.</p><p>Though she didn’t truly need any of it to look like a woman, not to Yen.</p><p>All she needed to do was smile like that as she strode toward them, eyes lit up and crinkling around the edges. All she needed to do was step into Yennefer’s space, mindful of the coffee and donuts, and kiss her chapped lips like a promise.</p><p>How lucky Yennefer was to be that sort of woman.</p><p>One who a woman like Geralt kept on looking at.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>and that's that!!</p><p>thank you for the encouragement and kind words, despite this fic being bizarre and unconventional and spinning away in directions I did not expect at the outset. it ended up less a trans story so much as a life story but ain't that just how it really is, huh? thank you for indulging my strange deviations and odd dialogue choices and excessive content warning paragraphs.</p><p>anyway, i'm on tumblr @limerental and considering a messy eskel sequel that will be nothing like this at all</p>
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